


The Bell Tolls

by 8TimesTheCharm



Series: San Andreas Faults [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 'like mercilessly', F/F, F/M, GET READY FOR SOME DARK INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT, Gen, Multi, and then more violence, rating is for violence and eventually some very explicit sex, the alt title for this fic is 'how Brigitte Lindholm got fucking dunked on', the symbrigs is one sided, there's a lot of death in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-10-05 10:49:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17323619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8TimesTheCharm/pseuds/8TimesTheCharm
Summary: Set 6 months after 'Dead Men Cast No Shadows'; Moira calls a favour on a motorbike club president to hunt down her fixation in Los Santos. Fareeha and Hana ready themselves for another bloody feud, but it gets personal for someone who used to be blissfully unattached to this chaos...





	1. Caveat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's strongly recommended that before you read this, you read both Old Secrets Die Hard and also Dead Men Cast Shadows, or little is going to make sense and/or be extremely jarring.  
> The tone of this is far more unpleasant and dark in its immediacy than previous instalments as well, so this may be offputting to some and I apologise for that! Otherwise if you want to push on, you've been warned but I hope you do enjoy with that warning heeded!!

_Hello pet._

_I’m in a real quandary here y’see and given that good solid workhorses are hard to come by, now that Merryweather and Talon are as good as fucking binned, I must seek lone wolves. That’s where you come in. I’m glad I was able to weed you out of the dime a dozen chancers calling themselves bounty hunters, because you do more than comb the countryside for bail jumpers—that said, you’ve got a remarkable number of those and having 40-odd notches is absolutely nothing to sniff at. Oh, and you know that I’m the only one who can properly treat your large fisty friend—Bob, right? Elegant name._

_I need you to go to Los Santos. I need you to capture Angela Ziegler, alive. Once you’ve procured her, we’ll make arrangements to meet where you’ll hand her over and I’ll give you the payment in full. I’ll wire you a reasonable down payment to start you off. If you must bring whatever gobshites from the Deadlock gang to assist, then very well. Just make sure they won’t be complications, and don’t expect me to pay their way either._

* * *

“One fuckin’ piece of shit-ass thing after ‘nother.”

The woman formally as Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe and ordinarily by her brusque, one-syllable-surname otherwise, grimaced in frustration at her long-suffering motorcycle steed. Her trusty old Western Chopper bike didn’t take kindly to the cross-state travel she forced it through, from dusty old Senora Desert haunts of the Deadlock gang, to the fringes of the immense hub of vice and debauchery that was Los Santos. Never mind making it to the hotel, she wasn’t even sure if she was going to be able to pull into a garage. So much for having all those cosmetic bells and whistles if the engine was a load of _shit_.

She needed to leave this somewhere, and options were draining as steadily as whatever oil trickled from the engine, forcing her to kick along the hot tarmac of the Los Santos sun as Rockford Hills’ finest brainless debutantes sneered at the leather-bound biker. Ashe didn’t pay them any heed; she had a pedigree in the blood as well as in the bank account that she knew they too nouveau-riche to fully comprehend. Thankfully there was a LS Customs nearby, judging by the loud neon sign. It’d suffice; she’d go find a hotel while it was being looked at, partly for the booking, partly to get her thin skin out of the unforgiving sun and the UV mace it was otherwise battering her with.

“Hey, who’s runnin’ this place?” Ashe called out, the chugging diesel splutter of her bike signifying it was in its dying throes. The corrugated iron shutter door rattled a little in the midday breeze above.

“That’d be me, who’s askin!?” replied a cantankerous voice, accompanied by heavy, rapid footfalls, until Ashe was joined by a vertically challenged, thickly bearded man in overalls. “Torbjörn Lindholm here, proprietor of LS Customs in these rich Hills; how can I help ye?”

“Mind if I leave my bike here with ya? It might look the part but the engine’s a lot older than the paintwork’ll let on.”

“I was wondering what hell noise that was coughing up in here! Give me a few hours, I’ll have her singing pretty with a revamped interior, so she can go as handsome as she looks.”

Ashe muttered a thank you before heading back out, her phone buzzing to life with a call from her oldest friend, and brother in all but blood “Bob ya sonnovabitch, how you doing?”

“ _Are you really sure about going through with that psycho quack’s job?_ ”

Ashe paced down the street to amble into the lobby of a hotel merely at the end of the block, her initial beaming grin dimming to a pensive frown “I don’t like the spindly weird fuck and trust her even less, but she’s the only one who seems to know what she’s doing with them muscle and bone implants keepin’ you going.”

Bob’s gruff sigh led into his gentle scolding “ _Don’t let my muscular disease get you doin’ dirty work for scum like her. I’d rather go out like a limbless supernova than have you kowtow to her shit; you ain’t a grovellin’ sort and she’s gonna use you for stuff you’re gonna regret._ ”

“Yeah, I know,” she grumbled back “But I promised you I’d do _whatever_ it takes to keep you alive, and I ain’t goin back on that.”

“… _just—just know that if shit goes down, I don’t want you gettin’ yerself killed. I’m the one on borrowed time, not you_.”

The line went dead, and Ashe doffed her hat, running thin fingers through her colourless hair with red eyes fixed to the polished wooden floor of the hotel. The name escaped her, probably a two-star dive trying to pretend it was a 3-star at best. She was operating in a drone manner, automatically going through the motions with the equally as fed up receptionist who slapped the keys to her room in hand. With little else on her person but a growing migraine, Ashe ventured back out to Burton by the Rockford Plaza, buying a quick and tasteless lunch from Al’s Dente to tide her over for the return to the mechanic. The culinary diversion also meant for respite away from the sun, as the afternoon set in earnest, so the intensity of the rays waned, but it meant she ruminated on the situation she found herself in—a debt to Moira O’Deorain that the elusive geneticist called in a favour on.

“Hey Bjorn, how’s the patient?” Ashe stepped in under the shutter with a pretence of friendliness to her _extremely_ surly mood.

“New engine, new transmission—fixed the brakes and gave you some wheels that might take cross-state travel and off-roading a little better than before. I saw sand grit in between the grip of the old wheel—did you actually try and drag it through the desert? Those wheels are made for tarmac, not off the road!”

“I _get_ it already,” she hissed, narrowing her eyes at the mechanic as he stood up from beside her bike—which looked a lot better between the cosmetic polish with chrome making it shine even more.

Torbjörn’s lip curled into a partial sneer for a moment as he wandered towards the cash register and computer, punching in some details with one hand while setting his hammer down beside the keyboard “Right, right. Well, your attitude makes you fit into San Andreas, but that accent’s a little further east. What’s got you in the city? Visiting for Vinewood tryouts? The outfit should get you in easy.”

The self-restraint Ashe had on her temper completely crumbled on that remark, the thinly veiled insult getting right under her skin and shattering the pretence of niceties in one fell blow “I’m getting interrogated over why I’m in town by a fucking Swede? Did your permanent residency get granted cos they felt sorry for you being a vertically challenged shithead?”

He said nothing, simply typing away, repeatedly hitting a _particular_ digit key while looking Ashe dead in the eye, hitting enter after that with all the irritation he could muster, immediately followed by the sound of a receipt printing.

“That’s a lotta times I seen you hit that there ‘0’ key,” Ashe observed, an ominous quality to the plain statement.

Wordlessly, Torbjörn tore the receipt from the mouth of the printer and pushed it towards Ashe “Cash or card whenever you’re ready.”

“Fifteen—FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!?” she shrieked, repeatedly rereading the slip of paper in a bid to try make sense of the exorbitant charge “Wait a goddamn minute, this should be at most $1k—where the fuck’re you getting those extra digits at the end?!”

“You’re a moron, but even I think _you_ can figure out the logic of this. This is Los Santos, after all.”

Ashe slammed her hands on the counter, her expression contorting into barely restrained fury “Listen you little prick, I’m having a real hard day as is. I’m only here because I got my brother in arms used as blackmail to make me do shitty favours for some psychotic bitch, my bike gives, I can’t stand the heat because I had the misfortune to have less melanin than is safe to go out in the fuckin’ sun with—and now YOU’RE addin’ fake zeroes to my bill rippin’ me off far worse than the snake oil salesmen back in the South! This is fuckin’ stupid illegal bucko, I’ll recommend you fix your lil’ mistake before I do something just as illegal.”

Now, Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe hadn’t known of the somewhat locally-notorious Torbjörn Lindholm occasionally deigning to rip off his customers here and there with overpricing on the odd part. He could get away with it, since his usual clientele were wealthy socialites who were panicking after crashing their wrathful father’s car and needed to get it looking pristine again.

Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe hailed from old money—old enough to predate the founding of the USA in Anglo-Scot minor nobility back in the appropriately nicknamed ‘Old World’, but she was reared in a cutthroat, intrigue-laden family politicking arena that used smiles and handshakes as sharply as if they were knives in themselves. And that’s _before_ she rebelled against her suffocating upbringing, where her new knowledge of how to survive amid the doldrums of society complemented her vicious social education nicely.

Unfortunately for Torbjörn, he had no idea who he was messing with. He made the mistake of deliberately prodding her to further anger, daring her to do this illegal thing she claimed she’d do “Oh, is that supposed to scare me? No luck. Stop acting tough, pay the bill. I know you’re just a delicate little blouse beneath that terrible cowgirl outfit.”

He stared back at the fiery glint in Ashe’s red eyes, watching her turn away and glance heavenward with a defeated sighing utterance of ‘alright… alright’. Such was Torbjörn’s assumption that he had won the argument, that he couldn’t have expected the woman to suddenly snatch the hammer from the table, and whirl her upper body towards him, channelling all of her strength into the swing towards his skull.

Shock was all that the middle-aged Swedish man had on his face, permanently slack jawed and silent as the flat of the hammer cracked the skull at the temple, shattering it into shards that shredded his brain. Torbjörn’s body crumpled to the ground with no fight in his limbs; any movement it showed was simply from the force of two more raging swings to the dent in his head, breaking the skin and grey matter oozed from the wound. Ashe flung the hammer away with a frustrated shout, the distant clang registering two seconds after releasing it into the air. She slammed the receipt down on the counter and, once she groped enough for a pen, circled the total of the bill and surrounded it with question marks.

The fury evaporated from Ashe, and sitting astride her newly tweaked, finely tuned Western Chopper, she kicked it into life and powered out with a demonic roar from the brand-new engine, leaving Torbjörn’s rapidly cooling body to be found by paramedics first, and then his devastated, horrified daughter Brigitte. She replayed Moira’s long message in her mind as she drove off southeast towards Strawberry to lay low, thinking of where to start her hunt.

* * *

_Having been former Merryweather and Talon staff myself, I can tell you that some information will be hard to come by, knowing Sombra’s work in destroying what records I had access to regarding Angela and who she’s linked to. Keep your ear to the ground though; that shithole of a city has a lot of grime that with a mere wipe will reveal the connections beneath. If you dig anything up and someone knows you’re there, get rid of them. Cover over the severed link, so to speak._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> always sunny theme plays because i said i wouldn't do any more multichapter fics and Yet Here I Am.


	2. Scarborough Fare

_Pointers that I can give you? Well, the government has good records, but I don’t expect you to break into the FIB or the IAA. You might find a weak link—old Akande Ogundimu himself had a run in with an MI7 agent named… Tracer? I believe? Small English whippet. A greyhound with an irritating bark, but a knowledge that could prove indispensable, especially since she can’t run particularly fast anymore. Where Sombra might have erased things, there might be something worth picking at in that walnut-sized skull of that lame pup. Send her back to London in a coffin if she catches on, won’t you? Sure, I won’t exactly be too upset if you tuck her into a Regal Mail sized envelope back to her masters, regardless if her brain puts things together or not. Anyway, you’ll find her near an absurdly large hairy man—a co-worker I reckon—tall, hairy, wide. He’ll be the unwitting beacon to your English lass._

* * *

 

“Fuckin’ asshole keeps addin’ directions like she don’t trust me,” Ashe grumbled to herself, going back through the addendum Moira gave. Just as much as she said that, however, Ashe knew that Moira was probably quite justified in not trusting her to follow through, given that Moira was dangling the health of poor old Bob over her head. It was like the carrot and the stick, but there was no carrot and just a whole world of stick urging her on. Her Western Chopper rumbled like a distant storm, far ruddier in health than before; she had to give it to the late Torbjörn—the shithead knew how to fix up a bike _real_ nice. Guilt glided around her as smoothly as the early morning air, she tried not to pay too much heed to it and simply doubled down on Moira’s ‘guideline’ of covering the links she had to sever. The morning drive helped normally air stuff like this out, but this simply made the doubt linger instead—better than mulling on the snippy attitude the dive of a hotel she had been in. Thankfully the receptionist from that hellhole was just as glad to see her go.

Ashe had relocated her base of operations (also known as somewhere to wash the blood off and get a good night’s sleep on something that wasn’t ratty mattress hell) to the famous Rockford Dorset Hotel. Though she had lived in Paleto Bay for over 20 years and the large, plush house she had there as per inheritance was one thing, the old money that ran parallel to her old blood meant she could indulge. She once remarked to Bob that she was the same kind of disparity that Los Santos had, appearing at once both incredibly wealthy or abjectly poor; this conversation after a brief stint intimidating rowdy patrons of an underground nightclub was typical of the duo, shying away from anything more serious than that. She enjoyed that job, but pickings for the Deadlock gang were thinner on the ground than they used to be.

The sparsely populated roads of La Puerta escalated into the looming perimeter of the Maze Bank Arena, with the placards for ‘Fame and Shame’ having been taken down in favour of an ‘e-sports extravaganza’, which eluded the biker’s knowledge. Something about a girl nicknamed D.Va going on for the last few days? The last date looked like it was tonight, but Ashe cared little for it, assuming some shut-in with cola bottle glasses and an aggressively negative hygiene level would prefer the event—that is, if they could bear to leave their parent’s basement or whatever crevice they’d ooze from. She pressed on, circling back towards Downtown, looking for the governmental source.

Skyscrapers towered above, with the looming authoritarian power the IAA and FIB buildings held as they faced off from one another across the Low Power Street plaza on Pillbox Hill. Seemed like a miracle anything got done for the country when the intelligence agencies seemed content to contemplate their own collective navels. Ashe found streetside parking (or rather, she made her own), and waltzed towards the plaza adjacent, distracted by how all the passers-by seemed resolute in ignoring a monk meditating by one of the blooming trees nestled between them.

Growing curiosity gently pushed Ashe towards this monk, who offered a smile through the subdued energy he held, even though his features didn’t seem to move all that much in acknowledging her. He beckoned “Come, share in the art of yoga with me. I sense some unsettling waves rocking your core—this will disperse them into the calm tide you require.”

“You some kinda mindreader tryna throw me off my game?” she muttered, though he was right in some manner—Ashe was trying to scope out the identity of the exceedingly large and hairy fellow by the IAA’s basement floor-level coffee shop ‘Ground and Pound’. He fit the bill that Moira had briefly established in her message, along with the comically tiny glasses that made him even bigger than he already was, hunkered on his seat below the small walkover bridge into the main IAA building. As she shimmied into a position that half obscured her behind the monk and gave her a clear line of sight, the woman observed the hulk of an agent speaking into a phone that would look normal in any other person’s hand, and not bafflingly tiny for his spade sized palms.

“You yearn for a stability that you cannot find in your home, nor career, so you risk much.” Ashe wasn’t listening to the monk, which was a good thing because that would’ve struck her a _little_ too close to home. She was too busy following the giant in the distance with her eyes, and she froze in terror thinking he was approaching her, having caught her out. But even as the vastness of humanity plodded slowly in her direction, Ashe seemed to go unnoticed under his nose. She strained her ear to hear the conversation on his handset, and once he followed the San Andreas Avenue southward, she could faintly hear the snippets of conversation when the street population thinned that little bit more and words were discernible through car horns and engines.

Once he reached the intersection with Vespucci Boulevard, she heard enough to guarantee there would be more to this trail. The magic words ‘so you’ll be heading back to England soon’ floated innocently in the breeze to every other denizen of the garish City of Saints, but not Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe. There was a thin wire connecting her, this Tracer, and keeping Bob alive. In a bid to remain low profile, she stopped by the Bar Fés and had a cursory look over the menu, frequently glancing to ensure the beast of a man didn’t care to linger on who might be behind him. Unfortunately for him, it seemed like this was his day off, so his guard was lower than it might usually be.

There was another harrowing encounter when he turned westwards instead of the initial eastern path up the boulevard, walked by her; he even gave her a glance as if recalling he saw her before. She’d need to move fast, and she needed the information sooner than he was obviously naturally inclined to meander it out. Ashe held her breath the entire time, but thankfully the man known as Winston kept his conversation “I could meet you on the Beach if you’re at the Vespucci Mart, get lunch from Venetian if they’re doing their lunch specials. O-Oh, okay! How about I meet you at the Bean Machine by Little Seoul? Cool, see you in a few minutes. I’m going to pick up something from Wraps, want anything? No? Alright.”

Absolutely perfect. Ashe diverted her path and made a call. It sounded like they were going to meet halfway, and she was going to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.

“ _Hey Ashe_ ,” Bob greeted “ _Whatcha need?_ ”

“Getting closer to guaranteeing your extension on that living thing; do we have any boys near Pillbox Hill?”

She heard a resigned sigh on the phone before she got her answer “ _Yeah, there’s a pocket of them lurking around the construction site as protection—y’know, on Adam’s Apple Boulevard_.”

Ashe hummed, remembering hearing of a band of her boys getting enlisted as protection since the Shimada racket was a little too high and they wanted to fight some shitheads in suits. The combination was potent enough for them to hang around for a few months. She didn’t know much about specific streets in Los Santos, just the way the patchwork quilt of various districts and areas knit together from affluent to broke as fuck. She knew enough to hurry straight to Vespucci and keep her guys stalling the big hairy giant of an FIB agent.

“I need them to cause trouble for a guy about your size but bigger, fuzzier than a Chumash hipster shitheel, and with hands the size of roadsigns. I gotta buy time so I can find a lil tourist all the way from Jolly Ol’ England.”

“ _How long do you need?_ ”

“I’ll give you a call. I won’t take long but I gotta get enough leeway to get through my questions, y’get me?”

He sighed again, in resignation that she was committing to this “ _Alright. Get going, I’ll move ‘em in._ ”

Ashe hung up with a mumbled ‘bye’, rushing through side streets and over what walls she could scale, going full tilt under freeways and across them with sudden energy, scrambling with the agility and flexibility of someone half her age. She reached the lower edges of Little Seoul and slowed to catch her breath, slowing to a walk as the Vespucci Canals came into view. The dozens of houses half built on stilts to allow for vehicles beneath them sat idle and quiet for this time of the day with plenty of people out working. It suited her perfectly as she ambled down the slight incline into the canals, keeping her red eyes sharp for someone who fit the description of a whippet as per Moira’s direction, using the height to scope out the best route.

There was a strong chance she was close to the beach, and so she descended, glancing rapidly through various faces she passed by until one very small, very thin woman was walking at a pace quicker than everyone else stood out to her. Ashe followed.

Lena had been looking at her phone and stealing brief enough peeks to ensure she didn’t walk headlong into street lights or other pedestrians, but something was beginning to nag at her periphery vision. She slowed down, and turned, making eye contact with someone who looked like an albino in some curiously cowboy threads that wasn’t named Jesse McCree. The Englishwoman quirked a brow “Um, can I help you?”

Caught out, but inwardly relieved upon hearing the decidedly foreign accent from her target, Ashe offered little other than a weary sigh and a shrug “Yeah, I’m here looking for someone that I think you know. It’s a job, and the person giving it has my proverbial balls in a vice to do it, so… think we got some things to share if you get me.”

She was scrutinised in silence as Lena tensed up, but Ashe gave little away. There was little left to give—she wasn’t exactly lying to her face. Lena peered around for a more secluded space, her hackles raised into business mode, satisfied that this woman didn’t have anything threatening on her.

“Who are you, who are you looking for, and what do you know?” Lena began, a steel edge to her usually quite lively attitude “I was having a good day until you showed up.”

Ashe raised her hands in a bid to calm her down even a little “Listen, I just wanna know what’s happening and I figure you do too. How bout this, I tell you what I’m up to and who for, and you can gimme a lil bitta knowledge and we can keep outta each other’s hair.”

Lena scowled “You first.”

“I’m here lookin’ for a miss Angela Ziegler. Now, you.”

Alarm bells rang loud and clear in the Englishwoman’s head. It had been half a year or so since the last time that poor woman got involved in any sort of nonsense be it Merryweather or Talon related, and she was _absofuckinglutely_ sure she didn’t need this mysterious albino adding to the whole trauma conga she had tumbled through. To that end, she would concede excruciatingly little “She lives in Los Santos, yeah.”

“Anywhere specific I oughta know?”

“No. You gotta share more with me before I give you that, yeah? Who’s getting you running their own dirty errands?”

Ashe smirks and cants her head to the left, then right. Real cute, but she could play hardball with this sort of shit too. “My patron’s Irish.”

“…that’s it?”

 _This was a fucking MI7 agent? Really?_ “That’s it.”

Lena stared. An Irish patron looking for Angela Ziegler through this woman who appeared unarmed. It was paltry information, but she wasn’t an idiot; the pieces fit together with disarming clicks in her mind and she held up a finger “Can you give me a minute?”

Ashe nodded, retaining a masterfully blank face despite immediate internal panic seeing Lena pluck out her phone and dial it. She made a loose gesture of hold her hands behind her back and rocking back and forth on her feet as if waiting for the agent to just get through the call, when in actuality she was reaching for her sawn-off shotgun concealed beneath the tails of her custom waistcoat and clinging to the back of her thigh out of sight. Lena held the phone to her ear and began “Hey, Pharah! Yeah, it’s me. Big, big news and none of the good sort. I think Moira’s back chasing Angela—.”

The only thing that Fareeha heard on her end of the line after the last syllable of her long-suffering partner’s first name was a catastrophically loud gunshot.

On the other side, Ashe had caught the phone from the milliseconds it hung in mid-air rather skilfully, after pulling the shotgun all but point-blank on Lena Oxton’s skull. She heard a woman frantically ask for Lena, for Tracer, desperately trying to confirm what had happened. Silently, she pressed the end call button and began sifting through the contact list for names that might get her closer to Angela Ziegler, more than the paltry tip of ‘she lives here’. No shit.

Unfortunately, nothing gave anything particularly detailed away. Nothing matched the Swiss doctor’s name, and the only names she really found were ‘Pharah’ who she was ostensibly speaking to in her final seconds, ‘Churchill’ and ‘Olivia’. With a frustrated and miserable sigh, Ashe dropped the phone by Lena’s cooling corpse, re-holstered her gun, and walked away.

* * *

It had been a gruelling two weeks of about 8 different gaming events, but Hana Song felt the kind of adrenaline that she once knew before her fated meeting with Fareeha Amari; it was the kind where tactics held as unorthodox but her trademark won her decisive battles and games, where her leadership quelled the contention of strategy among her teammates, and the acknowledgement of her quick reactions and thinking with prize money and awards. Her polyester fabric jersey was mercifully breathable for all the sweat the lights, the action and the packed arena yielded, and she couldn’t wait to rip it off and launch herself into the vast bath back in Satya’s place—maybe with Satya too to _really_ work out that adrenaline…

Her crew dragged her offstage after the cheering and the applause after the conferment of awards and medals, the dressing room awaited with drinks and snacks overflowing. Satya was there, applauding with a subtle smile before they embraced close while the team talked among themselves, with Hana cheekily reaching down and grabbing her rear when no one was looking.

“Where’s eomma?” she asked, parting with a kiss to the surgeon’s cheek.

“She said she’d be here when you finished, but--.” And as Satya was about to elaborate, Fareeha burst through the door with a sickened pallor, grim as the grave and visibly shaken. The tone of the room shifted into an off-kilter divide between overjoyed and sinking dread.

“Eomma? What’s wrong?”

“Moira O’Fucking Deorain is hunting for Angela,” Fareeha answered, leaning against the door frame and catching her breath “and while Lena was telling me the news, she got her fucking head blown apart.”

A horrid, terrible chill coursed through Hana’s spine as nausea seized her by the stomach and rose up to the back of her throat. It was 6 months since she had been ran out of town by her now-imprisoned superior Akande, long enough for people to have her fade from memory, long enough to have made this shock all the more unsettling. Her girlfriend, though not on the same close terms as Hana felt with the agent, was still shocked enough to cover her ajar mouth. The pilot inhaled deeply, her panting ceasing and her heartbeat at a resting pace now “Didn’t waste time, especially since Torbjörn got his head caved in. I called Hanzo and told him. Angela’s hiding in one of their complexes. He hasn’t said where yet, but it’s Hanzo, so I doubt he’s going to pull something dumb now.”

“Yeah, he ain’t Genji,” Hana retorted, the wind taken out of her sails but not enough to completely stifle her urge to throw herself face first into danger for the sake of another “We’re making a game plan to figure out who did this, and to keep eomma #2 safe. Can you bring Brigitte with you? I’ve got a real bad feeling that it might be related.”

Fareeha met her determined, if slightly uneasy, gaze with one of her own, nodding “I’ll swing by with her later; I’m going to get the full detailed report out of Winston first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is basically me realising 'hmm brigitte's way too happy for the tone of this series, time to catch her up on the shit everyone else went through'  
> even though i say this is going to be short the full intro of this fic is two of the ten chapters, smfh


	3. Star-Crossed

The sleek, modern interior of Satya Vaswani’s home by Lake Vinewood was not exactly the warmest and welcoming insofar as its decoration went, but it was still _home_ and it was basically Hana’s new house. She had essentially moved out when Angela moved in with Fareeha, not long after the Doomfist incident. The jokes about women in relationships U-Towing were thrown about but humour was a _little_ bit on the wanting side right now. Two people were dead in the span of two days, one of them was a close friend’s dad and the other was a fucking government agent from another country; the link between them was loose, but Hana’s hunch said they were closer than anyone figured.

These thoughts ruled her brooding mind as she stepped over the threshold behind the surgeon once the keys unlocked the door, pausing to kiss her on the lips before hurrying into her ‘office’ where her immensely powerful computer now sat. She fired it up after the air conditioning started up, and scribbled out a digital cork-board, slapping names and places on it like a conspiracy theorist. Satya quietly turned the kettle on whilst still in the kitchen “Hana?”

“Yeah babe?”

“Tea?”

“Whatcha having?”

“I think I’m going to need chamomile.”

“Yeah? Well I gotta say, I kinda want an East Island Iced,” Hana quipped, smiling to herself when she heard Satya’s soft chuckle from the sprawling kitchen-living room hybrid. “Chamomile is the actual answer, though.”

“I’ll fix you up one, priya,” the older woman replied, pulling her cellphone from her pocket when it hummed with a message. Opening it with a faint frown, she released a sigh she didn’t realise she was holding when she saw it was from Mei.

_‘Heard the news. Going to come by and see how you guys are. Jesse wants to talk to Hana and Brigitte if she’s there! Love, Mei XXX’_

“Ah, that’s right—Priya?”

“Yeah?”

“Mei is coming by. Jesse wants to talk to you about that project you’re doing in university—I assume with the e-sports tournament event, and now Brigitte losing her father, no real progress was made.”

Hana looked at the prosthetic arm that she was beginning to slowly put together with what engineering help she had from Brigitte. Certainly, it was looking a little neglected and covered in wires, but she’d be able to shoulder the work now that her commitments were more or less met. Well, once Tracer’s murderer was found as well as old man Lindholm’s, then the commitments would be met for sure.

“It’ll probably have to wait longer. He’ll understand.”

Jesse Hobo-looking Homeslice McCree would without a shadow of a doubt understand the whole ‘my dad got murdered’ thing at least for Brigitte’s sake. Just as she crossed Hana’s mind, the Korean wrinkled her nose a little, remembering a conversation they had backstage after one of the winner’s bracket matches over the tourney “Will… you be alright with Brigitte?”

Satya walked over to her door with two chamomile teas in hand, tilting her head rather naively towards her girlfriend “What do you mean? I’ve no issue with her.”

“Yeah, her crush notwithstanding—and actually…” Hana made a pained expression “You know that like, she’s _aware_ now that, you know she likes you a lot, right?”

“Oh that,” the Indian woman said blankly, setting the tea for the gamer down as far away from technical looking items and likely electrocution death as possible “Well, I don’t treat her any differently. If it’s a crush, it’s harmless; if anything, the question would be if it bothers _you_.”

“Nah, she’s like the only embodiment of honour in this whole state,” Hana replied, shaking her head “Doubly more than whatever the Shimada brothers can even comprehend too, even though I know Hanzo fucking **loves** the word honour. It’s just a conversation to have later I guess, but let’s be real, her dad getting horribly murdered will kinda be the main thing on her mind.”

Satya conceded, and sat quietly on a non-gaming office chair to watch Hana’s brain work in curious but fascinating ways as she speculated into overdrive. She almost didn’t notice the door knock some 45 minutes later, lazily getting up and collecting the now-empty mugs to drop by the sink en route to the main door. On the other side, stood Fareeha Amari who made the effort to smile as pleasantly as she could muster considering the situation, as Brigitte shuffled behind her a little on eye contact with Satya’s tiger-golds.

“Sorry, I was watching Hana try and figure out what’s going on. Come in.”

“She’ll probably want to hear the news I got then,” Fareeha replied, looking over her shoulder at the Swede shying away behind her and gesturing towards the interior to get her to come in, bewildered at the sudden change of character. To the surgeon, it seemed that some things didn’t change; Fareeha ostensibly didn’t clue together from context clues how Brigitte visibly wilted from Satya meekly.

“Hana; Fareeha and Brigitte just arrived,” the Indian called out, as she drifted back to the sink and dropped the mugs into the dishwasher “Would you guys like anything to eat or drink?”

“Neither,” Fareeha declined, adding a quick thank you to that. Brigitte shook her head mutely, looking over as her friend bounded out of her brainstorming session, seizing her in a tight hug as much as Hana’s thin arms could manage around the burlier mechanic.

“Hey Brigs, I… I’m so sorry about what’s going on right now,” the gamer murmured, feeling a weak but grateful squeeze back from her university buddy. Satya mentioned the Mei visit in passing to Fareeha, who acknowledged that with a brisk nod as she made her way towards Hana. The Korean parted from her gloomy friend to give her eomma a fierce hug in greeting “Yo, is the bae safe?”

“Yeah. I was talking to Winston about it, considering Lena was murdered while giving us the news Moira O’Deorain is back, the killer is connected to that asshole for sure. Eyewitnesses were sparse by Vespucci, and by the Rockford LS Customs, but a handful of people were just about paying enough attention to say they saw someone looking the same near both crime scenes. Something about a weirdly formal looking cowboy undertaker? Some just said plain old cowboy. Small and thin, but that’s about it because the city’s population are as vapid and self-centred as we thought, with chronic bystander apathy.”

“Oh I fucking CALLED it!” Hana suddenly roared, punching her fist, beginning to stomp around and swing her arms with the surge of furious energy “I fucking hate it but my hunch was super right—they ARE fucking connected! **_Fuck_**.”

While Fareeha attempted to coax Hana into a reasonable volume, Satya quietly set down a glass of water and a box of tissues on the small coffee table where she found Brigitte sitting gloomily. The mechanic caught her concerned look and seemed to retreat further into herself, looking at the floor but the surgeon swore she heard a muffled thank you. She sat on the couch nearby, not too close to startle her, but enough to know she was present and supportive “If you need anything, just let Hana or myself know, okay?”

“…kay.”

“Hey Brigs?” Hana called out, getting the bearer of the nickname to look at her “What’s happening in the homestead?”

“Mom’s organising the funeral. She’s like a statue, no talking, just distant and disconnected,” Brigitte murmured, straining Hana’s ears and forcing her to sit beside the Swede to actually hear anything “I just-- I needed to get out of the house. I need to not think about anything. I went to the Amari house because that’s where I thought Hana was, but…”

“But found just myself, and Angela for that brief day or so until the Shimadas whisked her away, as well as my mother and Reinhardt.”

Hana and Fareeha’s conversation side-tracked a while, as the doorbell rang with a familiar climatologist’s voice calling from the other side albeit muted. Brigitte listened in as Satya got up from her seat to get the door, zoning out into the clear glass table ahead of her, and considering the topic, she knew they were trying to be quiet out of not wishing to upset her further. There was nothing left for Brigitte to do though; her tears were shed, the anger and misery still swirled like a maelstrom within her but there was no outlet, and no connection to her active mindset—just a rumbling volcano waiting to erupt when the time deemed it right. For now, though, it was emptiness.

“Still ain’t calling him dad yet?”

“It’s still weird to me, it’s just… he wasn’t there the same way a father might’ve been?”

“But— _eomma_ — he fucking **_was_**! He just never got called ‘dad’ outright cos halmeoni didn’t want you to get all hardcore merc like both of them! She told you that—I was _literally_ there to hear the story she told up in the Shimada Tower Garden.”

“I—I mean, I _suppose_ he was physically there, helped care for me and still… oh fuck it, I guess I should, huh.”

“Hello!” a cheery voice exclaimed, followed by a squeal as Zhou Mei-Ling threw her arms around Satya and waddled the pair of them in with her amiable chuckle as the evening sun’s rays illuminated the two. Zarya followed in with her hair freshly dyed pink once again, and a slightly tidier looking Jesse with his placeholder prosthetic equipped, both wearing polite but more conservative expressions with the prevailing tone. When Mei parted from the surgeon, her face slowly mirrored theirs when she took in the sombre atmosphere “…sorry, I know that’s a little excessive of me.”

“It’s alright,” Fareeha replied, moving on automatic to help Satya set up the option of beverages for everyone, while Hana moved towards the new arrivals for her own quick greetings. “Did you hear?”

“Yeah, someone’s after Angela. What’s to be done?” Mei asked, deflating as Hana moved by punching Zarya’s fist lightly and high fiving Jesse’s remaining hand “It seems like there’s always _someone_ stalking after her.”

“More Merryweather shit, I assume,” Zarya rumbled like a storm, folding her ham-sized arms in front of her. “That tends to carry the most baggage, yes?”

“Right,” the pilot answered, leaning against the kitchen island with hunched shoulders and a furrowed brow “I’m sick of this too. I’m going to find Moira and put her behind bars.”

“If you manage to stop yerself tearing her t’shreds first,” Jesse retorted, fixing Fareeha with a pointed look, breaking his brief chat with Hana. The unspoken word of Reyes drifted between their shared stare, as well as Jesse’s own quest to pursue Akande Ogundimu, which earned him nothing but a missing arm. “Y’know that’s probably not the greatest idea.”

“I’ll be real eomma, because someone’s hunting eomma #2 on this Moira fuckhole’s behalf, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you might just lead that fuck straight to her,” Hana added, catching his intent, putting her hands on her hips “Say that hitman—or hitwoman, whatever—gets a hold of you? Given the KDR this person has--.”

“Hana,” Satya gently implored “Don’t use gaming terms people mightn’t know.”

“Right, sorry, the tournament’s still fresh on my mind. Given the ratio of encounters this person has, I’d say you might not live past it. I’m not going to risk you either—real talk? I’d say you should get into that complex with Angela, so she can at least be assured you’ll be alive after the dust settles.”

Fareeha frowned, but held her tongue, especially when she looked around the room and saw a lot of consensus murmured among the group that gathered. The only exception was Brigitte Lindholm, who for her silence had been ruminating on the thoughts of pursuing her father’s killer, and with her disconnect from Angela Ziegler’s core group of friends bar the sliver of a link with Hana, she was an ideal candidate. Two birds, one stone; Angela would be safe, her father avenged. Brigitte stood up, and with a weak smile towards the worried looks of her occasional lifting trainer Zarya and her bestie Hana, she stumbled outside to the wooden balcony overlooking the city.

The gamer slipped out to join her with a quick excuse, as the conversation drifted to Olivia Colomar’s recovery and the possibility that Amélie as well would consider assisting in the anti-O’Deorain bulwark. She waved when Brigitte turned to look, and joined her leaning on the glass-wood railing “Yo, needed some air?”

“Kinda.”

“Y’know, you can stay here as long as you need, right?”

Her friend stared at her incredulously, standing upright, becoming that little bit more animated than before with her hands “Hana, I couldn’t possibly--! Why would you want me around when I’m like _this_?”

“It’s called being there for your friends,” she retorted, nudging the broader girl with her elbow and a smile on her face “You said you needed to get out of the house, here’s all the space you could want!”

“You might not feel that way for too long if I’m here—y’know,” Brigitte’s expression grew pained as she gestured indoors with a feeble wave of a hand, a shadow of her previous liveliness. Hana could tell who she was referring to. “It’s **_awkward_**.”

“Dude, I’ll level with you; if you didn’t find Satya attractive, I’d actually be _pissier_ at you,” the Korean quipped, chuckling when the mechanic sputtered with disbelief “Yeah I mean it! It’s fine, like Satya was worried this would really get to me but, hey, I dig it when people give her the respect and awe that she deserves. I rag on Hanzo all the time because I can tell the dragon dweeb still kinda wants her to stand on him, but I don’t care past that. So, you wanna come back in?”

“…One more minute of fresh air?”

Hana nodded, gently bumping her fist into the Swede’s shoulder before heading back in. Upon re-entry, she noticed Mei and Zarya sitting around the kitchen island and getting a little bit boisterous with their banter—the conversation must have shifted to something light-hearted in the time she was outside, and no doubt assisted by what _definitely_ looked like alcoholic drinks in their hands. She had just noticed Satya’s expression which was a flushed look of wide-eyed scandalisation, and as quickly as Hana spotted that, she heard Mei call over “Oh there she is! I was just talking about some ideas you guys might be interested in trying out--!”

“Passionflower, I ain’t so sure that Ms Vaswani’s got the kinda appetite you do,” Jesse chuckled, drinking a beer with Fareeha at the coffee table, who had opted for a tall glass of water instead. Hana took a moment to parse the context, chuckling and shaking her head as Brigitte finally returned to the gathering.

“Well, that’s a secret of hers that’s well-kept for a reason my dude,” Hana grinned at the wannabe cowboy with a finger gun gesture and a wink, scurrying behind Mei and Zarya raucously laughing when Satya called her name with an outraged squeak. When the Korean peeked over at her girlfriend, she followed the frantic darting of her tiger-gold eyes over the Brigitte, who simply shrugged with a weak laugh.

“Don’t you guys stop on my account, it’s okay. I’m gonna hit the town.”

Hana, both curious and a little preoccupied by that given the extenuating circumstances, asked with a quirked brow “Are you gonna come back here?”

“If I don’t hook up with anyone,” Brigitte dismissively answered, patting her pockets down for the bare minimum of items she’d need: ID, money, keys, phone. Mei made an encouraging noise from the haphazard screwdriver cocktail, one she had cobbled together from the mostly untouched alcohol press that sat in the Vaswani houses (mostly for guests to do exactly this).

“That’s the spirit, but hey, I’ll keep trying to advocate for my suggestion back here,” Mei giggled, leaning against her hand and looking over at Satya with an extremely unsubtle overture “The good surgeon, I think, should get spoiled.”

The climatologist winked over at her, but it flew over the disinterested target’s head, as Brigitte looked over at her friend, who was busy nodding in firm agreement with Mei’s assessment “Hana, suggestions for where to go?”

“Dungeon Crawlers?” was the initial broach, but Zarya and McCree both let out a dismissive, negative groan at that. Fareeha shrugged, aimless and quiet in the conversation that had ensued while Hana and Zarya began bickering over the qualities of the bar in question.

“Try Tequi-La-La? I’ve never been, but it’s popular enough for all types of people to go.”

“Dungeon Crawlers is a little… niche. It’s Genji’s experiment and as such, that’s how Hana can A) get in and B) have a high opinion of it,” Jesse helpfully added, getting punched in his remaining arm by the girl who was fixing him up a prosthetic a room away. “Check out Tequi-La-La, have fun, be safe kid.”

“I will,” Brigitte waved to the gathering, her eyes lingering on Satya despite every single urge trying to coax her to not do that very thing. She offered little other than a tired, apologetic smile and a quick roll of her eyes gesturing to Mei, and Hana gave her a little knowing salute, letting the mechanic chuckle and relax just that little bit before slipping out into the streets.

* * *

 

It was probably a dumb idea to walk down the hills from Lake Vinewood, but it was kind of scenic, even if the incline down Whispymound Drive was full of angry drivers _aghast_ that some pedestrian would give this path a shot despite the lack of sidewalk. About 15 minutes of what natural life Los Santos County had to offer later, and Brigitte made it to Downtown Vinewood, spotting the garish neon sign of Bishops’ WTF emporium as her signal to take the right into West Vinewood. Several crosswalks, a few drunk drivers and near misses later, the rock bar known as Tequi-La-La sat on the corner of Eclipse Boulevard and Milton Road.

The bouncer ushered her in, satisfied for reasons she could only presume that were based on her looks and youth alone. Maybe she shouldn’t have listened too hard to two people coming to the end of their 30s, since most of the clientele here were either clueless tourists, middle-aged crises riddled men trying to find someone 20 years younger than them, and the awkward hipsters who had some notions about attempting to reclaim it as theirs.

Naturally, most of the middle-aged men did their level best to try enticing her away with the promise of fast cars and expensive gifts, but the offers bounced off Brigitte uselessly. Given that she’d find some fault in their vehicle choice, it was probably better for their _desperately_ fragile ego. She took in the loud music and roaring conversation of the dozens of people inside while quietly sipping her beer, serving as a welcome respite for the harried bar staff behind the counter. The mechanic herself wasn’t really able to avail of the peace she apparently exuded towards them, brooding over the city she had been born and raised in, and how dismissive the LSPD were with the crime scene investigation. They didn’t care to pursue the perpetrator of her father’s death once they saw the receipt, circled various times with a pen and noting how the math above absolutely didn’t add up. ‘He brought it on himself,’ was the prevailing thought, one that infuriated her even if she knew herself that if this was anyone else in her dad’s place, she’d have agreed flippantly.

“Hey, this seat taken?”

Brigitte looked to the source on her right, spotting an older woman with extremely light hair (she couldn’t discern its precise colour in the dim lighting frequented by coloured bulbs), a loose dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves, high waisted formal pants and suspenders like she had come out of an exceedingly formal event and was winding down. The university student, comparatively underdressed in the extreme with her tanktop and ripped jeans, shook her head and watched the woman sit beside her, before turning her attention back to the bottle.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” the woman ordered, leaning onto the counter. Brigitte gave her a curious look, and received a languid, feline smile for it “Hey, it looks good.”

“Do I know you?” the mechanic finally asked.

“Nah, but that can change if y’wanna. Might need to go someplace with better acoustics though sweetheart. It’s hard to hear ya in here.”

 _Sweetheart?_ Brigitte tilted her head. This woman’s speech pattern reminded her of Jesse a little; did _they_ know each other? A little presumptuous considering the accent was shared by a not-insignificant proportion of the USA, but it was hard not to jump to conclusions.

“My apologies, I didn’t introduce myself proper. I’m Ashe.”

“Brigitte.”

“Thassa cute name. Cute way o’sayin’ it too,” the woman known as Ashe chirped above the music as much as she could, thanking the bartender for her own bottle “Y’from here?”

“Yeah, but my family are all Swedish and I was raised in a very Scandinavian household. The accent makes me sound more foreign.” Brigitte noticed the tattoos on her new companion, and actually lit up a little “Oh, that’s nice ink you have.”

“Why thank you,” Ashe grinned, raising it a little more so she could show it in some detail, and all too happy to divert the conversation from Sweden given how her initial encounter with anyone from that country went. A skull mounted on a pair of wings with ‘Deadlock’, and a thorny vine around her forearm that ended in a rose by her wrist, with the vine continuing up under her shirt. “Rest of it’s a secret that few men and fewer women see.”

Brigitte was about to comment on the Deadlock thing, since it reminded her of her father’s brief time as a member of the Lost, which had been disestablished for a number of years now, until that latter addition overloaded her with the suggestive undertone. “A-ah, right. I have one too, it’s small and it’s on my left upper arm—look.”

She brought her furthest limb closer, flexing unintentionally to show the bolded gear on her arm, not realising until she looked up what kind of effect that had on her chatty new acquaintance. Ashe’s eyes widened, fanning herself and mustering a sheepish little smile when Brigitte innocently tilted her head at her like a clueless little kitten.

“Sorry sweetheart, I just… whew, it just got real hot in here. Y’mind if I step out for a bitta fresh air? Gonna need it after that display.”

“Y-yeah, sure.”

She watched the older woman leave, the parting gesture being that of a bit lip and a laden wink, stoking the embers of something beginning to catch alight in her lower abdomen when Brigitte realised she was staring at Ashe’s hips swagger away. This might have been a wise decision after all, a more enjoyable outlet than whatever would’ve come of being cooped up in Lake Vinewood, fawning over someone she definitely couldn’t have.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [always sunny theme plays]


	4. Dalliance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the bulk of this chapter is p much a lot of sex, so if that is not yr jam, hold on til chapter 5

Ashe stood out in the cool night of Los Santos, leaning against the brickwork as far away from the smokers as she could, limply offering her hand to the bouncer as he did his rounds of making sure they could get back in, stamping the back of the palm with the bar’s logo. It was a welcome caress of chill on her face, though it simultaneously reinforced the fact that she really was getting awful flustered over this girl she just met. Well, no harm in a bit of fun if she’s up for it, right? It was difficult to tell if this Brigitte was into the whole thing as much as her; she wasn’t very forthcoming, and Ashe supposed that had a lot to do with her general experience being that of men who were all too eager to sleep with her.

Her phone began vibrating in her pocket. She hoped it was Bob, but the screen told otherwise.

“The fuck do you want, Moira?”

“ _Just an update, pet! Don’t snarl at me like that, I’m curious!_ ” the geneticist replied on the line, making a show of her faux-meekness and apologetic tone “ _Jesus though, that’s some snap on you. Distracted?_ ”

The Deadlock leader turned away from the small gathering of people outside Tequi-La-La and muttered darkly into the receiver “I’m layin’ low, cos I dunno if you recall, but I killed a fuckin’ English secret agent as well as a fuckwad old swindler. Feds would **_really_** like to find whoever got Her Majesty’s Service all ruffled and shit.”

“ _Something in me blood’s terribly pleased about that—the English thing, 800 years and all that bollocks—but meagre historical jokes aside, I do understand that much_.”

Ashe rolled her eyes, even if that wasn’t going to be conveyed visibly, it seemed to have manifested in the sigh that joined it “Well? There’s your update, so...”

“ _Y’sound like you’re out on the town_.”

“Maybe I am.”

“ _Meet anyone nice?_ ”

“The fuck do you care?”

_The fuck **did** she care?_

Ashe wasn’t as thoroughly versed on Moira’s in-depth personality as her former colleagues may have been, but she knew enough to know that Moira simply did not have the emotional comprehension of companionship either romantic and/or intimate. Her asking this question set off a whole airport security’s worth of alarm bells for good reason.

“ _If you’re laying low, why not lay low with someone, right?_ ”

“Spoken like someone who hasn’t a fuckin’ clue.”

“ _You’re not wrong, but I’m going nowhere til y’tell me some goss!_ ” Moira chuckled, egging her on.

“Since you won’t shut the fuck up til I tell ya, fine! Met a young lady, kinda different to the usual customers in this here place from what I see.”

“ _D’ja get her name?_ ”

“Uh, she’s a Swedish girl called Brigitte, or somethin’. Real cute, though she’s hella buff. It sounds like an oxymoron, but she makes it work.”

“ _Oh_ ,” was the only response Moira gave, flat as it was.

What Ashe couldn’t see, nor would she ever see, was Moira’s blank face, upon making the mental links, splitting malevolently with her serpentine grin enough for her eyes to crease half-closed. “ _Well, she sounds like a ride that you’ll have plenty of fun with. Go get her, y’cougar mess. Then, when you’ve had your fill of her, try get back to schedule, hmm?_ ”

“Jesus, Moira, you make it sound like I’m gonna pump n’ dump, like a few of my last encounters did with me,” Ashe grumbled.

“ _Oh, oh goodness no! If you think there’s more to this little encounter in the making, that’s all you, pet. I’m simply reminding you of why you’re actually there to begin with_.” There was a pause. Moira’s low laugh made her horribly uneasy “ _I’d be overextending that favour if I was trying to obstruct something so promising. Talk sooooon!_ ”

* * *

Brigitte had just finished her second bottle, not really feeling much of the effects of anything, until Ashe returned. Curiously, something certainly swept over her with more immediate sensations than anything this watered-down piss masquerading as beer could hope to cause, as the woman sat that much closer than before.

“Say, I just had the closest thing to a cold bucket of water poured over my head by steppin’ out for a breather, but comin’ back in here I’m findin’ I still got some funny notions cookin’ up top.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Well, I was thinkin,” Ashe began, sidling up even more intimately to the mechanic “I wanted to ask if y’did wanna see the _rest_ of my tattoos, if y’get me.”

“Do they go past your shirt?” Brigitte asked, the question rapidly becoming rhetorical when she felt Ashe’s arm wind around her waist oh so slowly.

“The tatts sure do go past the forearm, and I’d like to show you them in complete privacy.”

By this point, she was getting a little fed up of the whole dancing around it, especially when lust roared into full flame. She stared at this rather entrancing woman longer and listened to that seductive purr to her accent. What could be a more perfect way to ignore her current misery than indulging in a one-night stand with a rather dashing stranger? It had been a while since last time she slept with anyone—the last time being a bit of a muddled encounter with Hana herself perhaps a year ago while too drunk and emotional to know better. Brigitte gave Ashe a wry look even as her heart hammered in her ear out of nervousness around someone so interesting, so potent in their capacity to take her out of the misery reverie “Just give it to me straight.”

Well, straighter than this inevitable entanglement.

Ashe leaned in, her lips brushing the shell of Brigitte’s ear “I want those big, buff arms of yours—.” Her hand sat a little lower on the Swede’s hip as the other traced over the aforementioned biceps “--to hold me in place while you **_fuck_** me so hard, I forget the colour o’the sky. I got a few lil things I brought along that I’ve been meanin’ to try out, and you’re an ideal candidate to test ‘em on me.”

Her breath was hot and light on the mechanic’s face, imploring her to face the older woman and found her lusty gaze impossible to tear away from. Ashe momentarily glanced to Brigitte’s lips from where she lingered on the sprinkling of freckles, and taking the hint, the mechanic moved in to close the gap. The bar staff tried futilely to ignore the spontaneous sparks of physical chemistry from one end of their workspace, as the younger half of this steamy embrace rested a hand on Ashe’s thigh and deepened the kiss. It went unnoticed by the rest of the customers in the bar who were far too busy already with each other, even when Brigitte showed her new partner the capacity of her strength by pulling her onto her lap.

“Ohhh _sweetheart_ , I think we’re gonna need to go get some privacy if yer gonna do that t’me.”

“Where are you staying?” Brigitte rumbled against her neck, hands magnetised to Ashe’s hips.

“The Rockford Dorset,” was the response, one that took the student aback immensely.

Wide-eyed and awash with disbelief, the expression of pure surprise made Brigitte look that much more naïve than her gung-ho actions would have Ashe believe “Wait-- _Seriously?!_ Isn’t that for all the real rich types?”

“I ain’t a cheap kinda gal,” Ashe shrugged, lazily draping her arms on broad shoulders “Don’tcha think it’d be a fun time ruinin’ a 5-star hotel room? Or rather, ruinin’ _me_ in one?”

Now, Brigitte Lindholm did not think of herself as very interested in any sort of dirty talk, didn’t think it was her thing and in her previous ‘encounters’ any time anyone started she was quick to nip that in the bud. However, when it was matched to a leisurely purr of a Southern accent like this lady who had to be at least a decade older than her, it did something unspeakably _magical_ to her libido. The hands she placed on those hips dug their nails in through the fabric, and Brigitte growled “If we don’t get moving now, I don’t think I’ll be able to wait til then.”

Ashe reached over to the counter and hurriedly paid the tab for both; before Brigitte even had the chance to protest that act of generosity, the older woman was already pulling her up the stairs to street level. The two went to the crest of Milton Ave’s sharp hill downwards, where Ashe’s motorbike was waiting. Brigitte admired the handiwork of whoever sculpted the frame, a curious pearlescent effect that under the more halogen bulbs of shopfronts made it look crimson despite the base being pitch black, the red matched on the brilliant red of the wheel rims. Climbing atop of it revealed the work also went into the engine, the deep thunderous rev of the engine no doubt heightening the salacious mood floating between them. She now understood why a growing amount of motorcycle users were women, even though had she any clarity of mind through this thirsty fog, she’d know better than lend credence to that silly rumour. Aboard the rather memorable, unique bike and clinging to the comparatively waif-sized waist of this Ashe, they went straight through the intersection of Hawick Ave onto Boulevard Del Perro, weaving around Carcer Way and sneakily through the Dorset Place side street onto the main Dorset Drive thoroughfare where the massive Rockford Dorset Hotel unfolded at the end of the famous shopping avenue. There was traffic, that much she was sure of, but whatever potent mix of adrenaline and lust that was filling her senses made it seem like no vehicles existed in Los Santos’ perpetually busy Rockford area.

The lavish reception area was a blur of reds and golds that Brigitte paid no heed to, what with her tonight lover insistently pulling her to the lift and glaring holes through anyone that dared try and hop in with them. She leaned against the mirrored wall.

They were perfectly alone, as Ashe tapped the 7th floor button and leisurely put her hands against the wall on either side of Brigitte’s waist. She looked at her admiringly, the height difference slightly in the student’s favour, fingers tapping against the decorative metal rail inside the elevator “Christ, what a gorgeous bundle of cute n’ muscle. I can’t believe how lucky I struck in that dive.”

“I might be striking gold not too long from now,” Brigitte quipped, with a little waggle of her brows. She didn’t let Ashe have enough time to even chuckle at that, seizing her into her strong arms and pulling her in, kissing like it was the end of the world with social rules steadily being forgotten as it went on. The mechanic’s hands slipped down to cup the older woman’s rear, causing her to move back from Brigitte’s hungry lips with a sudden whine, holding eye contact until the ding of the lift rudely interrupted the rising sexual tension. Ashe laughed softly, walking out towards her room and putting a heavier emphasis into the swing of her hips left and right as she did. Hypnotised, Brigitte followed her to the room ostensibly hers, weaving her arms around Ashe’s body and waiting for her to open the door.

To her immense but extremely interested surprise, what Brigitte got instead of the door swinging open was an overpoweringly languid grind up against the crux of her legs, grunting abruptly “Oh you _fucking **monster**_.”

“What was that sugar?” Ashe coyly asked, bracing herself against the wooden frame and pushing her rear harder against her crotch “I didn’t quite hear that.”

“ _Jag vill knulla dig hela natten_ ,” the brunette growled with a hopeless urgency into her ear, one of her strong hands acting on her surge of want and seizing the inside of the older woman’s thigh, slipping upwards and pressing insistently on the fabric. She nibbled her ear, her breath hot on Ashe’s cheek “ _Gillar du det h_ _är?_ ”

Exhaling heavily, suddenly, Ashe licked her lips and fumbled with the card key “In English please, sweetheart? Though I sure do _like_ how filth sounds comin’ outta your mouth.”

They stumbled in, the door hurriedly closed behind them and locking the idea of propriety outside; in the frantic entry, Brigitte pinned Ashe to the wall, roving hands all over her until the slightest give in the shirt let the student immediately slip her hands beneath and relish in caressing her skin. The biker nudged her back, coaxing her to watching as she smiled wryly and unbuttoned slowly, gazing deeply into Brigitte’s light brown eyes. Only then did she realise that her partner had nearly pure snow-white hair and deep red eyes, but the lingering on this fact was diminished as she watched Ashe unbutton the dress shirt with flair and show.

“I wasn’t _really_ expectin’ much outta tonight, black lingerie just happens to be my favourite,” she murmured, shimmying her shoulders out and letting it fall to the floor. The contrast was sharp against her milk-pale skin, that certainly stood out all the more when Brigitte’s eyes traced over the full extent of her tattoos, over her collarbone and back up to her face with the trail of snow-white hair leading her. Ashe smiled at the pause “So, what’s the translation for whatcha said earlier?”

“What I said was—.” In one swift movement, Brigitte picked her up and flung her onto the king-size bed, kicking off her boots and climbing on top of her, pressing her muscled body against Ashe’s slight frame with her face close “ ** _I want to fuck you all night long_**.”

“You gonna make good on that huh?” Ashe whispered, millimetres from Brigitte’s lips “Or are ya just all bark n’ no bite?”

Just as she finished her sentence, her Swedish partner took enough offence to that to bury her face into the crook of Ashe’s neck and shoulder, and nip at her skin. The sensation of pain was brief, followed by a throb as she felt a tongue brush over the bruising mark, as well as the frantic handiwork on her dress pants as the mechanic fought to get her clothes off as well as her own. Brigitte sat back, wrenching off the material and leaving her older partner in merely underwear and little else, eyeing how the thorny rose on her arm ascended to the shoulder where it interwove with other stalks into a circle, and two more vines moving onto Ashe’s body from the circle on the shoulder. One disappeared behind her back, the other curled onto her left collarbone, blossoming into a rose; Brigitte could only assume that another rose appeared on her shoulder blade, and if she was honest, she liked Ashe’s face far too much to do anything from behind.

“Admirin’ the rest of my ink?” she was asked, sitting up against the bed’s elaborate looking, plush headboard, sweeping her hand on the end of her non-tattooed arm through her hair and pulling it back “It’s mostly roses, but if y’come closer, y’can see thistles on the circle up here. It’s a nod to the ol’ heritage o’mine. Maybe a conversation for another day if y’want, but for now, how ‘bout you pull off yer John McClane lookin’ clothes and get _in_ me already?”

Well, not much refusing that she could do there, so Brigitte sat up and peeled off her tanktop, with a sports bra underneath that would have been a topic of gentle derision by Ashe had she not seen the iron, rippling abdomen that was hidden beneath. The light jest turned into an unintentional whimper at the back of her throat, emboldening Brigitte to crouch down over her anew and grab her hips, slipping her thumbs beneath the delicate black panties and tugging downward. With a sly smile, the student peered over from where she found herself at the valley between Ashe’s legs, intoxicated by the scent of pure arousal.

“Well I say sugar, you’re lookin’ like the cat that got the cream down there,” the biker chuckled lowly, until a trail of deep kisses with the hint of teeth moved down from the inside of her thighs to her begging core, writhing as Brigitte lapped away. The mechanic felt her hair tie being pulled out with shaky hands, as Ashe ran her fingers through her chestnut brown lion’s mane worth of hair “Who’s the-- _fuckin’_ **_monster_** now? Oh _god_.”

She wriggled side to side, unable to close her legs to even playfully deny Brigitte, the shoulders proving too broad and muscular to escape it—and in truth, Ashe felt no real compulsion to, enjoying the feeling of someone who **intimately** knew their way around a clitoris for a change. She groaned, she begged, she twisted about while her hands pushed against the back of Brigitte’s head and guided her to the finer details with electric success. Her voice went up an octave when she felt one, and shortly enough two fingers pushed inside of her; before Ashe could even attempt to coach her further, the dextrous fingers curled in and her eyes flew open and she squealed in a most unbecoming manner.

“How the _hell_ did I fuck any woman before you?” she mumbled, her breathing rate increasing “ ** _Fuck_** that feels good.”

Brigitte moved her free hand onto Ashe’s stomach, mostly to coax her still while she amped up the ministrations of tongue and fingers alike, smiling from where she was when she felt Ashe’s body pulsing and seizing her. For a fleeting moment, she swore that her squirming lover took her hand with a gesture that had far too much weight and meaning behind it for a fling. Though the older woman’s thighs were firmly clamped around her ears now, there was no mistaking the howl of her name as the biker’s hips thrust and jerked towards the sensations elicited by the mechanic’s deft touch. Before Brigitte let her reach that peak she desperately sought, the brunette cruelly parted, leaving Ashe stranded. With an accusatory look, she braced herself onto her forearms and leaned upward, glaring at her victorious looking partner “Aren’tcha gonna finish the job?”

The answer she got was infuriatingly brief, coupled with a smug look “You said you had things with you.”

Well that was difficult to argue against. Ashe’s eyes lit up a brighter shade of red, drooping to the lascivious half-lidded look they had before. She purred “Bedside locker to your left, sweetheart. Double ended. Get _in_ me before I get bored n’ kick you out.”

Not that she was going to do that, really, since she was rather enthralled by the paradox of Brigitte being a cute, pretty, young lady as well as so much stronger and capable than she was—and indeed, more powerful than any man she’s had in the past never mind the women. If all went well, she’d like to meet up with her again, but one thing at a time; this mantra was important especially considering the size of the object that she told Brigitte to retrieve from the unassuming wooden locker, something even the mechanic looked a little hesitant and awed by. It was a double ended dildo, though rather than being a simple straight line of silicon, it was bent in the middle at a 90-degree angle, probably to enable a bit more engagement for the parties making use of it. For Brigitte, she hadn’t exactly used anything like this before, but the learning curve was hardly that steep given the scenario she was in.

“This…?”

“Thassright,” Ashe answered, sitting upright and grabbing Brigitte’s jeans by the belt and quickly unfastening it and the button beneath it “I want you to put that smaller end in, and I want you t’fucking plow me until we both can’t fucking move.”

The brunette leaned in and kissed her while being disrobed, moaning against her lips when she felt Ashe’s own fingers mimic the touching she indulged in earlier. Leaning back, the older woman smirked confidently, brushing her nose against hers “Looks like I ain’t the only one drenched here, hmm?”

She only got a ragged gasp for an answer when her index finger circled sinfully slow against the single fabric barrier between her and the dense nub of nerves that kept Brigitte spellbound. Ashe chuckled, reaching around with her free hand to pinch open her lover’s bra, tear it off and then did the same with her own. The movement was so swift and nimble that despite the waves of pleasure firmly fixing the Swede in place, glossy light-brown eyes gave their redder counterparts a quizzical look.

“I got a lotta practice in these fingers, sugar. All the better to get you outta your own clothes.”

“That’s true,” Brigitte murmured, obeying Ashe’s gentle nudging towards the bed, lying down and wriggling out of the jeans that the biker scrabbled off of her. The denim was discarded to the side, as she also plucked the toy out of the pliant mechanic’s hand, tugged the last vestiges of decency off of her, and steadily spread her legs “If y’wouldn’t mind, wouldja put this on? Or uh, _in_ , rather? Lemme help ya.”

Before she had a chance to even say a word, Brigitte felt Ashe’s experience make itself extremely well known with her other pair of lips, yelping suddenly and wriggling on reflex. Her breathing was stilted, laboured, stuttering as she watched Ashe angle her head and felt lips and tongue glide up against her core. Unsure of what to do with her hands she braced herself on one arm and used the other to brush white strands out of her lover’s face, all the while trying to arrest the skyrocketing pace of her heart and lungs. Brigitte’s eyes rolled into the back of her head when Ashe, adventurously, dived inside with her tongue curling in one movement, and back out with an arrogant expression.

“Like what you’re gonna be packin’ there, sugar?” she whispered, fingers gliding along the toy and guiding it towards her “But even as wet as yer feelin’, I hafta ease you in cos of it.”

There was no comprehensible response, but Ashe took the grunt as much of an affirmative as that shaky nod implied it was. Carefully, she eased the smaller though thicker end of the double-ended toy into Brigitte, using slow, shallow thrusts of it to get her to acquiesce and let it slip in without too much difficulty. Thanks to the perpendicular angle the object was set at, it pointed ardently ceiling-ward, which meant there was only one more logical move left for Ashe to make, and something Brigitte realised was perhaps her favourite position judging from the grin on the older woman’s face. Ashe moved onto her knees, putting them on either side of Brigitte’s hips and placing a hand on the younger woman’s breastbone, winking at her and taking hold of the toy standing upright. Time seemed to stop for the Swede beneath her, watching with rapt attention and urgently short breath as Ashe aligned the toy with her begging entrance, and gradually lowered herself atop of her.

Initial contact was nothing short of divine, and Brigitte exhaled sharply along with Ashe’s sensual sigh of relief, her hands grabbing the older woman’s hips possessively and coaxing her down as much as possible— with every centimetre that she was taking in, the brunette couldn’t stop herself from watching, the view affecting her from a psychosomatic level rather than a genuinely physical one.

Nothing she’d done before compared to this, and all she could do was rasp out a name that didn’t match who she was effectively inside of right now, and whose name hadn’t occurred to her actively but still lurked underneath the surface. Ashe knew her own name wasn’t this ‘Satya’ that the younger woman mumbled but her partner atop of her deflected it away. Everyone had their own stuff going on, so this wasn’t a huge deal. She was far more preoccupied with how _incredible_ it felt being filled by her dashing partner, having gone without the feeling for a lot longer than she’d like to admit; and besides, she wasn’t really calling Brigitte by her name here either, just by a very affectionate, lurid hum of ‘sugar’.

And then, Brigitte found the strength and composure to begin thrusting up.

Ashe cooed over the messy sound of Brigitte’s hips steadily moving upwards against hers, bracing herself with both hands on the mechanic’s chest and her body undulating in raptured glee. She tried to set the pace to something a little more gradual but was betrayed by her own lust and need and instead her body opted to match the powerful lunges from beneath her. She had no chance of resisting, gazing down at the focusing Brigitte and pleading through her moans “Harder, deeper, please sugar, I need it.”

“What d’ya need?” was all the vigorous student could manage to ask, diligently fucking her and relishing in her whimper.

“ _Fuck_ , I don’t know if yer a blessin’ or Satan incarnate,” Ashe growled, angling her body a little more parallel to Brigitte’s to give her the more fuller rotation of her lower half, which, thanks to the nature of the double-ended toy spreading a wave of pleasure through the student beneath her, had the side effect of making the brunette’s hips hit harder upwards to meet hers “Oh **_Christ_** , sugar, I _need_ you!”

One strong pulse of Ashe’s inner walls around the toy, causing the end within Brigitte to strike her in a spot she didn’t know was so _susceptible_ to pleasure, was all the prompting she needed to grab her older lover in her arms, swap places so that the Swede was on top and upright, ensuring she didn’t slip out even once. Once the switch was made, there was a moment that though brief felt like it lasted for a full minute as they held a steady, breathless stare. The brunette gazed down at this mysterious, enthralling and endlessly seductive albinistic woman who was splayed out beneath her, all but mewling for her to keep going, quaking hands running over Brigitte’s breasts, up her shoulder and the back of her neck, down her flanks and squeezing on her hips like a plea.

When Ashe felt her legs being lifted, enough so that they rest on her lover’s broad shoulders, she settled back with a smirk curling her lips, which parted as her jaw hung open along with her red eyes flaring wide as she was filled further than she previously could comprehend. Brigitte’s teeth were grit as she pressed her hips firmly against Ashe until neither knew where one ended and the other began, feeling the haze around her vision, the pull beneath her gut as the toy struck her g-spot, the tell-tale signs that she was beginning to get close.

She had about enough mercy for Ashe to start her pace slowly, steady, gradual, planting her hands on either side of the older woman’s shoulders for balance and her arms straight so she wasn’t quite folding her in half. The bonus to such a position was the ability to watch her writhe and move against her thrusts, moaning at a volume that only increased the faster she went, until the only other noise accompanying their shared grunts and groaning was skin against skin. The deeper Brigitte struck, the narrower her world was until her awareness was focused solely on the bed and the woman she was pounding desperately like her life depended on it, vaguely aware of Ashe moving her legs from where they rested on her broad, toned shoulders, to wrapping around her waist and giving her very little leeway for movement.

For such a proud, confident and assured woman of such experience, the way that she begged was so vastly contrasting it struck a powerful chord within, that Brigitte held herself lower, closer against her lover whilst never compromising on the force and drive of her thrusts, close enough to kiss her—messily, but no one was complaining. In fact, it was enough to spark the trail to the dynamite-like sensation growing within; the mere brushing of lips was enough to elicit a sudden, loud whine as Ashe seized her closer with every ounce of strength in all of her limbs, pleading for more, fingers tangling through locks of chestnut coloured hair. Brigitte buried her arms between her partner and the bed, holding her close and murmuring soft encouragement in both English and Swedish alike, acting like the stable rock when the reality was fractured, and she was losing her battle against the wave of pleasure generating within.

“Please, sugar I’m so **close** , _please_ ,” Ashe breathed, her nose pressed against Brigitte’s cheek, struggling to maintain eye contact through fluttering lids, her groans heightening in pitch to whining.

Brigitte snarled and her hips picked up speed, the haze encroaching on her vision and the thread that kept her aloft from being overcome becoming ever thinner. Ashe whimpered, until she just could not hold out anymore and gave in; her limbs locked up around Brigitte as her innermost walls twitched almost non-stop around the diligently thrusting toy inside her, mumbling her name into the owner’s ear again and again. That was all the half-wild Swede needed to reach her pinnacle, letting out a mighty roar of nothing coherent as her hips lost their firm and steady rhythm, a slave to her apex as her hips jerking arbitrarily, clenching around the end of the toy that sat snugly within her and against her g-spot. Despite everything she fought to remain upright and vigorous in her fucking until she simply had no energy left, collapsing on top of Ashe, who resolutely clung to her.

“I gotta say, I ain’t ever had fun quite like that before, sugar.”

Brigitte, sluggishly, turned her head from where it was face down in the pillow by Ashe’s own “Yeah?”

“Mmm, enough ta—hang on a minute,” she reached down, taking hold of the object still linking them together and with a sharp inward gasp, disengaged herself from it. Ashe paused long enough to peck Brigitte’s nose and murmur a quick apology “Sorry sugar, this might be a little soon for poppin’ this out but I don’t like things in the way of my post fuck cuddle.”

“Post fuck cuddle—?” the student began with an amused look, cut off by her own yelp as the sensations picked up tenfold when Ashe plucked the other end of the toy from her body. Unbidden, Brigitte’s body undulated as she moaned, eyes completely unfocused for a moment with the aftershocks shuddering through her body, missing the lazy throw of the used toy towards the ensuite bathroom by Ashe. When she regained coherence, she felt warm, embraced as closely as possible “Ah, this is what you mean.”

“Mmm, I’m all big talk but I’m a delicate lil’ peach for the afterglow.”

Brigitte said nothing, returning it quietly and resting her cheek on the crown of silvery-white hair, letting herself take in the plush surroundings that she pretty much ignored owing to sex-induced tunnel vision. Deep red mahogany furniture, upholstered with a bright caramel velvet, the walls wallpapered with similar colours, with a desk, a flat but wide plasma screen television, absurd floor space even past the assorted furniture, and what she could assume was an equally spacious bathroom. She probably needed a shower with the thorough smell of sex in the air still, as well as feeling a definite sheen of sweat over her skin.

“Y’know, I think I liked this so much, I might not kick ya out after all. But, if y’got shit to do tomorrow morn, I ain’t stoppin’ ya.”

“I gotta go home tomorrow and help out with—,” Brigitte hummed, shaking her head and deciding not to mention the fact that it was a funeral, less so her father’s; she was not about to be a buzzkill to herself, and the less she thought about it until the last possible second, the better “—a family thing, but I’m not in a rush to go tonight, that is… if you don’t mind?”

Ashe found enough energy to prop herself up on her hand, her smile warm and deeply satisfied, while her other hand idly stroked up and down Brigitte’s flank “Not at all, my only warning’s just that I might get _real_ **_frisky_** again in the mornin’, so I just hope you’ll be up for that.”

“…that might be fun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so there'll be consequences, as you can imagine, for this particular sequence of events


	5. Second Son

_Message left: Yesterday, at, 21...30... pm._

_I believe, knowing how the Shimada once turned the city inside out chasing a lover of Angela’s, that she’s in cahoots with them. If you don’t get anywhere with Tracer, try those Shimada boys. Probably thin on hints, but sure, it’ll be a bit of fun for you to break one of them over your knee eh?_

* * *

The Shimada Tower Gardens, Pillbox Hill, Downtown Los Santos.

Sombre windchimes rattled lightly round the plush verdant space, the wooden gazebo covered in a new lick of red paint housing the scion of the Shimada clan with his Swiss guest, sharing in the refined tea set housing peppermint to ease the persistent worries within the good doctor. The breeze was gentle, the chaos of Los Santos never quite extending into earshot from the ground; up here was peaceful, safe, ironclad in its security. That said, it was still a source of different anxiety, the overpowering sense of isolation and loneliness, coupled with the permanent state of unease knowing that O’Deorain was there, just… _waiting_.

“Did you hear anything about the funeral?” Angela asked, her voice ever so slightly hoarse. The cup clinked onto its plate, the warm green swirling in it at a drinkable temperature.

“Only what Hana told me. It would be strange of us to send anyone of the clan to a civilian’s funeral,” Hanzo answered, sipping at his own beverage “But what she said was… curious. Torbjörn’s daughter Brigitte seemed a little ruffled in her day-old clothes, dazed, and Hana clarified that she might have had a one-night stand in her… unique interpretation of her grief.”

“ _Hanzo_ ,” Angela scolded gently, frowning “If that’s how she wishes to express the excess of emotions, that’s what she does. Don’t judge.”

“Let’s be glad that Genji was not the one to have filtered the message back,” he chuckled quietly, the smile remaining when he heard his guest echo the laugh, even if it was fainter than his. “In any case, the presence of Merryweather veterans was curious; Fareeha as you may have guessed, noticed nothing, but Hana mentioned that Brigitte’s mother—Ingrid, I believe?— was acting unusual around them when Brigitte wasn’t in proximity.”

“Curious, but… Ana was familiar with Torbjörn, so I can only imagine Reinhardt was too—she mentioned him as the stubby old ram once before in conversation. It’s not like they had absolutely _no_ reason to be there, either.” Angela paused to sip at her tea, bright blue eyes now dimmed by the extraordinary stress of the last year taking its toll “…has there been any breakthrough with the investigation on the two murders?”

Hanzo’s bearded jaw seemed to clench tighter despite already being closed, his eyes cast downwards as he put together his thoughts and recollections of what was related to him “Winston was as diligent as he could be despite grieving in his own manner for his colleague, cordoning off both areas and cross-referencing eyewitness accounts in order to see if there was a commonality between Torbjörn’s death and Lena’s. If he didn’t, I don’t think we would have known for sure the perpetrator is the one and the same. Though… that said, the details were paltry but—but as soon as Genji heard them, he got it into his brain that he would absolutely find the culprit and ‘bring them to justice’. I can only surmise he is way in over his head.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Angela cautioned him, her eyes reviving a little with a hint of irritation at the well-meaning but ultimately foolish younger Shimada “Even if his heart is in the right place and his mind blunders with the follow through, he’s very good at pinpointing the true focus of what it is he seeks. How else did he latch onto Fareeha’s trail so quickly?”

“For all our talk of being dragons, he makes a better bloodhound,” Hanzo joked feebly, though his eyes spoke volumes of his concern “He’s been off the grid for a couple of hours. I won’t lie, I’m very concerned about his wellbeing given how ruthless this cowboy suspect of ours is.”

* * *

The last thing Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe remembered was drifting by the Vanilla Unicorn on her recently souped-up motorbike, idly pondering what that cute Swedish girl was up to.

The last thing she saw was a few grey suits with green pinstripes.

The last thing she heard was angry Japanese in various voices, and through the blackening haze of her sight, the sound of her motorcycle screeching away into the distance.

When she came to, there was no direct light scorching her lids, letting her flutter her eyes open and adjust to her new surroundings. The sensation of coarse pain scored her wrists and ankles, and the heavy pull of gravity on the former let her know exactly where she was, a pendulous motion confirmed her suspicion; she was trussed up like a prisoner, on what looked like an upper floor of a still-yet-to-be-finished building, mid-construction. She looked around, able to use the landmarks to place herself as somewhere in Alta, with a view of Downtown’s high-rise buildings to the south where she was facing, trying to hear for any movement, any signs of life. Ashe tried calling out, until footsteps—steady, confident—paced towards her.

From behind a steel beam with rough rope, connecting to the threadbare ceiling from where she was hanging by her arms, Ashe watched the younger son of the Shimada family step out casually with his sheathed sword in hand.

“You have much to explain,” he muttered, standing in front of her otherwise good view of the Arcadius building with his arms extended ahead, holding the scabbard parallel to the floor beneath and steadily taking hold of the katana. “I, Genji Shimada, am not known for patience. Who are you? Why do you threaten Angela Ziegler?!”

“I’m Ashe,” she answered simply with a shrug, or as much as she could from where she dangled aloft “And it’s not like I enjoy dabblin’ with this kinda shit. I don’t like threatening good people who help others.”

“Did you kill Torbjörn Lindholm? Lena Oxton? Accounts put you at the scenes of both,” Genji stated tersely, pulling the blade free by an inch, the sound intended as a warning to her not to hold back any information.

The woman grimaced, caught out when she tried to glaze over it, guilt at the deaths pulling at her “Yeah, I s’pose I did—look, if you want any more shit out of me, I’d mighty prefer it if y’let me chat on equal ground when talkin’ to ya. Just untie my feet n’ let me stand.”

Ashe sucked in a breath when Genji unsheathed his katana fully and cut her feet free from the bonds that held them together in one swift, terrifying swipe. He tossed his scabbard aside in a turning swipe that also cut her from the rope dangling above, one of a few bundled together, with a hook at the end of one looking secured via chain to the iron bars above.

“Thanks, now I can be a lil’ more open with ya. Listen, I’m gettin’ coerced here to kidnap Angela for someone called Moira O’Deorain.”

“I know the name,” the scarred man snarled. “What does she have on you?”

“She’s keeping the only person I care about alive,” Ashe answered resignedly “I don’t care about my blood family, but he’s the closest thing I’d call a brother and a friend. Whatever that Moira does, it keeps him truckin’ through his rare osteomuscular disease.”

Genji turned southwards away from her, facing the high-rise skyline ahead of him “And she is using you then.”

“Yeah, normally I’d be a bounty hunter scourin’ for bail jumpers when not rallying my boys. The old mechanic and the agent were to cover my tracks, as much as I hated goin’ through with it; I can’t stand killin’ people who mean well but I tolerate loose ends farrrr less, but I guess this is gonna land me in more trouble I s’pose.”

The man ahead of her said nothing initially, musing on her words “Caught between a rock and a hard place then? I see, while this doesn’t excuse what you’ve done, nor what you intend to…”

As he pondered aloud, Ashe took the opportunity to look around for avenues of escape. She was still bound, and her seconds were ticking; Genji still had his sharp blade out and the way he was holding it seemed to scream of the likelihood that he’d be decorating it with her blood. Red didn’t sit nicely with green unless it was Christmas, and the festivities had long since passed for those colours to hang out together. The hook above from where she dangled previously looked like it was anchored securely enough to take her bodily weight, but where was she gonna go from there?

“…we’ve all been in that position before--.”

She coiled her legs down and in like springs, holding her arms at ahead with the aim to get her bonds attached to the hook in a single upwards sweep along with her jump. If Ashe’s calculations paid off, she’d have some physics on her side to help perhaps launch her to the next floor, but… maybe she’d need to spill more blood to truly escape this particular conundrum. This had the same loaded consequences that killing that Englishwoman, perhaps on a smaller scale but more intense for the influence the Shimada wielded… it was that or die like a chump and let Moira have the apt excuse for letting Bob waste away.

“But your words have me thinking… your boys, hmm? Your tattoo said Deadlock, and that name rings a bell. A dangerous, final bell for you, if you answer incorrectly--.”

Ashe leapt up, swinging her arms upward and hanging from the wrist anew, but this time she had a plan. With her legs moving back and forth as a counterweight, she began to swing like a skinny pendulum, and the rattling of the hook on its chained location above alerted Genji to something happening behind him. He turned, and for his trouble, earned a centrifugally assisted dropkick to the chest, hitting him with enough force to slam him backwards through the flimsy wooden bar being the only thing between him and a fatal plummet. Genji didn’t hear the apology Ashe offered on the contact of heel to torso, not over the chains grating against steel rebar, not over the wind rushing by his ears and the buckling of metal with the smashing of glass immediately preluding the cessation of his senses.

His sword looked lonely and feeble clattering to the bare floor without its owner, as Ashe lost control on her hook and disengaged, falling painfully on her side a few feet to the left of the katana and half-winding herself. She could hear a car alarm going off below but cared little for it until she cut her wrists free using the tossed blade by holding it between her boots, sawing the rope back and forth until it frayed away against the finely folded metal. The coarse material fell from her hands, and she rubbed the reddened skin beneath, sitting up and quickly closing the gap between where she fell and the edge over which she drop-kicked Genji. She peered down some two—perhaps three—storeys and found the smashed car roof atop where he lay motionless, buckled underneath him and with glass radiating around the wheels and staring back up at her with glassy eyes. Not a nice way to go, and one that she really, _really_ wished she could have done without causing—but she had to keep Bob alive, even if it was more and more at her own expense.

Ashe made good her escape, scuttling down the series of ladders that brought her up to this half-constructed loft to begin with. There was no time to locate her bike, probably confiscated by the Shimadas, and something she’d have to worry about later. Traffic was thin, but there were thankfully a couple of cars parked along the street, so she could perhaps get away with a bit of larceny here. She didn’t exactly trust walking when she heard confusion in voices similar to the ones she heard when she blacked out initially, surmising accurately that they were this guy’s underlings. If Ashe didn’t get the fuck out of dodge now, her creative method of escape would’ve been for naught.

Darting towards the one that looked like it hid a robust enough engine in the hood, she elbowed the glass in on the driver’s seat-side and let herself in, sweeping the glass from the seat and pulling wires together until the ignition hummed into life. Desperately, Ashe floored the car when she heard the confusion amplify into chaos, aiming to get out of the city before sundown. She needed to find somewhere to lie low, and then retreat to the hotel when the focus on her had faded via a Downtown cab.

* * *

By now, Hanzo was stood and pacing around, checking his phone every 5 minutes for some sign, something—anything—that indicated where in the hell Genji had vanished to. Angela, by contrast, remained seated, with a fresh mug of peppermint tea and looking no less perturbed than she had on her initial arrival to the Shimada Tower. He swore under his breath, a hand sweeping back loose locks of hair from his face “I’m… beginning to get very worried, if I’m honest.”

“I know,” she flatly answered, her eyes drawn immediately by the flurry of activity at the lift entrance to the floor and spotting two nameless suits staggering out of it like they were running a marathon.

“Shimada-san! Shimada-san!”

“What is it?! What’s happened?” he barked, louder and more vicious than he had intended.

“Your brother—an ambulance was called to the scene when the others found him—he fell from our construction site in Alta!”

“What!? What was he doing there?” Hanzo baulked, a heavy weight sinking his stomach into the pits of nausea “He had no reason to _be_ there.”

“He had her! The woman who is looking to kidnap Ziegler-san!” the other suit added while his comrade caught his breath desperately “She killed the short mechanic and the agent, that’s what Genji said when we got her. All we have left is her bike, she’s nowhere to be found.”

“Never mind her,” the elder Shimada interrupted, adding quickly when he glanced over at Angela “Not now, she’s gone for the moment and we’ll look for her when I know how my brother is.”

The Swiss woman felt a twitch in her fingers, the urge to seek out and help so powerful and difficult to ignore, but even if she wanted to get out to Pillbox Hill’s clinic there was no way on earth that Hanzo would permit her to slip through. She noted with a bitter taste of irony at the back of her throat that it was her saving Genji’s life initially that afforded her this protection, and it will be her fault that he might have just walked headfirst into his most likely fatal plummet. Hanzo didn’t hesitate, breaking into a run and barking orders, the vulnerability and panic showing in the waver of his voice, the haphazardness of his instructions. Angela watched him leave, and once she was left alone, she did something she hadn’t bothered with in a while. Once she finished her dregs of peppermint tea, she set the cup aside and clasped her hands in the first earnest attempt at prayer in almost 20 years, praying for a miracle to stop this implacable hunter, praying for some kind of out that meant those she cared about would stop suffering. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another one bites the dust (?)


	6. This Mess Of Ours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crossed wires become common knowledge.

Two days passed, which Ashe spent cloistered away in a cramped Stay’n’See in Chumash, surviving off room service and god-awful tv, which had the bonus of keeping her reasonably informed on the flurry of activity by the Shimadas in the city she had briefly escaped. Given she had the audacity to wear her usual outfit that had her mistaken for a cowboy undertaker, it was imperative to keep that hidden for now, perhaps until she had to strike again—keeping her notoriety affixed to clothing was probably for the best. She packed it away in a canvas bag she had gotten from one of the half dozen hipster stores littering the small town, having bought a few replacement outfits just to be assured of relative anonymity. The place she hid in was available on short notice, and that’s all she cared about, while the disjointed talking stick with a beard dressed in flannel cared only about the money she had up front. Capitalism at its finest.

She’d have to scout out the fringes of Los Santos just to see if it was safe to get back in. Her bike was probably as good as gone, and she’d just have to live with that. There were poorer decisions she’s made, after all, and they were beginning to bite her as immediately as she went for them; one might tell her ‘look before you leap’, but she had no fucking time to even look when she had to outrun Bob’s mortality catching up on him.

Ashe stepped out of her small hovel with the stolen car she had parked outside, looking northward in time to see the weirdly nautically themed house to her left abuzz with all the activity that a wild looking old woman could bring, with a mild hunch to her posture and immaculately conditioned mane of white hair cooing over some large boxer looking dogs. Absently, the woman looked and waved at her, mistaking her to be a new neighbour. Ashe merely reciprocated it with a weak gesture, and a fainter smile; she wasn’t in a mood to humour this kind of chatter—.

“A nice day, yes?” _Oh lord, this loony’s French?_ Ashe grimaced, her countenance and delivery was far too cheerful for the one Frenchwoman she had known. There was a fleeting moment where she wondered how Amélie Lacroix was, wherever she had holed up in the city. Hearing how she ended up from Olympic shooter to a literal assassin and then back to quiet civilian status was quite a rollercoaster, but Ashe probably wasn’t too far removed from her own absurd journey.

“Guess it is fer some,” she diplomatically answered, walking to her car in her pastel pink skirt and white shirt and pulling her beige cardigan over her closer, obscuring her tattoos and making her look like just another Los Santos native. The look was completed with a broad brimmed hat that also gave her the benefit of keeping the sun out of her face, and with a swift movement it was joined by aviator framed shades. Now that she was the picture of an extra from a dreamy indie music video, Ashe started up the car and drove out of Chumash with her things in her bag, aiming to drop them back at the Rockford Dorset, and try get some information at the edges of the city.

Some two hours driving later, she had gotten her things into her plush Rockford Dorset room, and the only conversation the receptionist offered was a glib question about that strong looking girl she brought back those few days prior. The bounty hunter never answered, simply shrugging it off and heading into the city smog once more when midday passed, and the sun relaxed its rays.

With a single cab ride over, acting on the notion that overcame her on a whim, Ashe made her way to Del Perro Pier, using the lights and noise as a sort of smokescreen through which she’d mask herself, listening to anything curious and untoward as far as a pier fairground could get. There were stranger things, especially seeing as the Vagos would, on occasion, lurk around beneath the wooden boards, cutting deals and skimming the profits of the retail above.

Indulging in a small treat of sugary cotton candy, the bounty hunter ambled about the ever present, cosily-sized crowd that wasn’t too dense to worry about manoeuvring through, and not too sparse to worry about being picked out of the crowd, actually feeling her shoulders slacken by a small amount. Ashe idly munched away, pacing towards the north facing side where there were more views of the more rugged, countryside focused coastline. She felt calm and safe enough to zone out, reflecting on how her current quest was built entirely around frantically giving Robert ‘Bob’ Cambria Birch as many extra hours onto his dwindling lifespan while perhaps stealing them from herself directly. After all, within a week she had made some **powerful** enemies, merely by trying to follow the trail Moira breadcrumbed down for her in a series of disjointed phone messages and mask her own in the process.

“Hey there lady, y’seem familiar,” a rugged voice began from barely two metres away, taking her out of the reverie with a fearful jolt and she almost swung a fist straight for the face of an old friend.

Thankfully, Jesse caught it in time.

“Whoa- _hoh_! Hold yer horses Liz, s’just me,” he quipped, albeit nervousness tinging his voice “Yer jumpier than a giddy mare! What’s wrong witcha? Those’re clothes y’don’t normally wear—nice though, before y’yell at me.”

“Ain’t there manners s’posed to be in that head o’yers?!” Ashe answered, half-annoyed at the jesting but half-relieved it was McCree and no one else. She allowed herself to chuckle and gently shoved him “Ahhhh, it’s good t’see you again y’sonnovabitch. Been a while huh?”

“Been a few years since I thought it’d be fun riding a bike,” Jesse chuckled, joining her in leaning on the railing to her left “But that’s long past us. How’s things? Big Bob still truckin’?”

The almost rehearsed candid expression Ashe had, faltered. She shook her head lightly, resigned and forlorn “He’s losin’ his fight, but he’s still all smiles. Might still be a brick shithouse worth o’man but… you can see it. Bob’s slowly wastin’ away; he’s in a clinic out in Blaine County at the moment. Been askin’ for you on occasion, he misses ya.”

Jesse’s own look was dispirited, but he had been quite familiar with the affliction that was sapping Bob away from the living. He simply didn’t think it was so accelerated, and his face said it all; time had that way of sneaking up on him. But the topic of conversation veered hard when Ashe caught an oddity out of the corner of her eye when the rugged man folded his arms. Looking with more deliberation, she gasped when she saw it was without a doubt a prosthetic in place of his original left arm.

“What—Jesse, what in _God’s_ name happened to ya!?”

“Huh, yeah, that’s some news I was getting round to,” he chuckled with a limp nod towards the absent limb “My pops got murdered. I chased the guy who did it all around the city, but when I thought I mighta cornered him, I got pinned under some fiery wreckage that woulda blown up if I didn’t get that arm amputated. As the good doc there said ‘it’s him or the arm’.”

“Christ, I—shit I had no idea. I’m so sorry that all happened. I sure missed a lot when y’left huh?”

“S’fine, shit happens, people change,” he brushed it aside verbally, while gesturing to the false arm “I’m actually helping out a university project—‘member Fareeha? Ana’s kid? She took in a student called Hana almost a year back, and she’s studying how to make prosthetic limbs that move n’ shit to make up for the lost ones. I volunteered m’self as a test subject; she’s doin’ the science and her buddy Brigitte does the engineering lifting.”

Well that name was familiar.

“Brigitte?” Ashe repeated, pressing the name gently, just in case he knew that pretty thing that fucked her delightfully dazed and completely satiated those couple days ago “I met a Brigitte actually—she Swedish? Tall, auburn hair, toned and strong?”

She wasn’t able to get another question in, since Jesse seized on it and continued on, blasting through her follow up unawares “Swedish, big buff chick but real gentle kinda personality, super smart? Yeah that’s her alright, she was workin’ on my arm with Hana. Thing is though, it’s all on hold since she’s grieving over her pops.”

Without a hope of ratifying that yes indeed, that’s the girl she met, the additional comment stopped her in her tracks.

“What… happened to her old man?”

Something changed in Jesse’s normally relaxed, smiling look. His stare hardened as it looked over the contrasting gentle churn of the waves beneath the pier, his functioning hand tightening into a fist  “Some psychopath rolled into his business and took real issue with it. Caved his head in and left him for his daughter to find. I’d love to know who did it, seein’ as they suddenly gave me n’ Brigs a shitty thing to have in common.”

“Oh… oh _god_ ,” Ashe mumbled, wide-eyed as dawning comprehension hit her as brutally as a freight train derailing into a school with all of the collateral damage that could possibly happen “Oh **_fuck_**. That’s… well… Jesse, it’s been swell—I guess, I think— catching up but I gotta get going, I think I ate this cotton candy shit way too quick.”

Clueless, but relatively acquiescing considering how horribly sugary fairground shit can get, Jesse replied courteously “Huh? Yeah sure, no prob. Give me a call if y’wanna hang out, heck I might bring Brigitte along!”

She was already breaking out into a brisk walking run just to get the hell away, powered by the sudden slam of her gut into her throat with full throttle nausea, to process what the damned hell she had managed to do to both herself and that poor girl who she just committed tenfold crimes on. The level of crossed wires Ashe had managed were of a nature she couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around; how in the _fucking **hell**_ did she not only kill this man in a fit of temperamental anger, but barely days later casually _bed_ his grieving daughter!?

If the bounty hunter only knew, if she _knew_ , she _wouldn’t_ have propositioned her at all in the slightest, she’d have avoided her at all costs but now all she could think about was how the chemistry between them was electric and made her feel so much more _alive_ than she’d been for a while…

The confusion lurched in her body, made her _sick_ like she was staggering on the deck of a ship, like the pressure in the air changed like the broiling of a spontaneous storm forming on the sea. Her mind, however, was wrapped in a pervading numbness that ran counter to the horror contorting her innards at what she had committed. She went from wanting to see that one night stand again, to hoping she’d never cross paths in this life—but there was something in the way everything had fallen that made this reunion seem inevitable and far closer than Ashe ever wanted it to be: it was akin to trying to outrun the whirlpool that threatened to sink her already endangered endeavour with her poor navigation. All she could do now is retreat, retreat and figure out her next plan of action as best as she could, through a maelstrom of violent self-loathing and disgust at how profoundly **_cruel_** life could be when conspiring with fate.

* * *

The knock on the door was the signature that Brigitte liked to use, her initials tapped in Morse code which was a novel idea that Hana and Satya both took to with baffling swiftness. It was like their own new secret handshake, a code that while certainly public domain usage it had never been bothered with in Los Santos, and the surgeon found the idea so wonderful that she employed it as soon as Brigitte even floated it by her. One knock, then three rapid ones for the letter ‘B’, followed by a brisk knock, a longer held knock and two subsequent taps for the letter ‘L’; that was the plan, but a text interrupted the mechanic when hitting the door for the latter initial, changing the letter ‘L’ to a ‘W’ as she stopped to check her phone.

“Brigs, that you?” Hana’s voice called out from the other side.

“Yeah, sorry! Fareeha texted me just now so that’s why I fucked up my code!”

The door opened, and Brigitte’s neutral looking face (otherwise wearing a content smile in knowing that she was coming back to a safe house) was met by Hana’s flowing with grimness.

“Uh… are you okay?”

“C’mon in, just… we got news and it’s not good.”

Wordlessly, the Swede followed her in and fired back a text to the pilot confirming that she made the commute from the garage back to ‘Casa Vaswani’ in one piece. Hana walked in, touching Satya’s arm as the surgeon murmured in hushed rapid conversation on the phone, gesturing to show Brigitte had returned. The Indian woman offered a fragile smile that evaporated back to the unease that gripped her from the inside out, finishing the call (to Hanzo, as Brigitte noted from the name dropped in the murmuring) and sighing deeply “Fareeha’s going to get holed up with Angela in the complex now.”

“Good idea, especially after that. With the way shit’s going,” Hana shook her head, walking to the fridge to grab an E-Cola “I feel like eomma’s gonna be next on this psycho’s hitlist.”

“Guys, what’s… what’s happened out there?” Brigitte asked, her question punctuated by the crack and hiss of a carbonated drink can being opened.

“Genji Shimada actually found your father’s murderer,” Satya bluntly answered, immediately regretting it when her words caused a flinch in the mechanic’s overall posture “And… by that proxy, Lena’s murderer too. Unfortunately, in secluding her away up a construction site and lowering his guard, he was kicked out of the 3rd floor and landed on a car roof.”

“Oh fuck,” the Swede hissed, fingers curling into fists at the ominous news of victim #3 added to this murderous list. “Was he—did he die on impact?”

“Well it’s actually a miracle but he’s still alive. Just about, mind you, but he’s undergoing intensive care as you can imagine. Dr Takemi told me that the prognosis regarding him walking again is looking unlikely if they can’t figure out a way to fix his spine.” Satya set her phone down on the kitchen island and paced over to the vast windows looking southwards over the Los Santos skyline from where they were nestled in the foot of the Vinewood Hills.

“The one thing that the dumbass managed to do at least, was confiscate her ride,” Hana piped up, swigging some of her soda “It’s a pretty sick ride, and considering her whole undertaker cowboy get up, she sounds like she should be rolling out on the Grapplemania ramp on that bike.”

“Wait… a bike?”

Satya and Hana shared a brief, quizzical look. The latter noticed an anxious note in Brigitte’s voice, while the former tilted her head, pondering why it was an issue. The gamer spoke first “Uh, yeah. Judging by what Winston put down from the eyewitnesses—he said it was a chopper type motorcycle or something—the bike was at the Los Santos Customs in Rockford, and now it’s sitting in some Shimada garage I guess. Why?”

Something grotesque in its weight began to gather in the bottom of Brigitte’s stomach.

“…do you have a picture? How unique was it, exactly?”

“Brigitte, I’m not sure if—,” Satya whispered, something dawning on her far earlier than it did for Hana; in any other time and any other place, with any other sequence of events played out prior to this, she’d have made an amused comment about Fareeha’s obliviousness being one of the lessons absorbed by the normally astute glitch.tv streamer. Hana simply plucked out her phone from her back pocket and began thumbing through menus until she found the image file she got from Winston by ways of her eomma.

“This was her ride.”

There it was, in full HD on the 1080p quality screen, was the very same Western Zombie Chopper motorcycle—heavily customised with the red pearlescent sheen and white flame decal on pitch black—that Brigitte Lindholm had hitched a ride on with the woman known as Ashe back to the Rockford Dorset. And with that photo of jarringly clear quality, the revelation bloomed in a scale far greater than 1920x1080 in Brigitte’s head with a punch harder than Akande Ogundimu’s right hook that she had been not _only_ conversing with her father’s killer, but she even had been grossly **intimate** with her. Things stopped feeling real, and she stopped feeling like she was in her own body.

Fathoming what she had done was elusive on a mental level, complex in its horrors that words eluded it, but it was being realised very much on a bodily, physical tier. The floor lost consistency and balance abandoned her; Brigitte staggered towards the nearest bathroom that she knew was on the upper floor of the Vaswani house, unable to stay wholly upright and almost tripping over her own feet and falling into doors with a hand clamped over her mouth. Hana and Satya followed hurriedly, seeing how the colour and vivacity not only drained from Brigitte’s face but indeed the rest of her skin that showed past the tanktop and ripped jeans she was so fond of wearing.

By the time they had gotten to the bathroom, Brigitte had emptied her digestive tract of everything she’d consumed that day thus far, but such was her level of self-disgust and hatred that her body was trying to purge itself inside out. Satya ordered Hana to get a glass of water and a box of tissues, while she reached for what she knew was the mechanic’s toothbrush nearby and mouthwash to keep on hand. When the brunette’s guts had stopped rebelling against their owner, the sound of choking, hysterical weeping filled the silence instead. The couple stayed with the utterly despondent, thoroughly demoralised Swede, offering quiet support and care where they could until the young woman could just about function again.

Satya and Hana exchanged another look where the latter professed immense apologies through her mournful eyes alone towards her girlfriend for blundering into this, and then vocalised it towards Brigitte “…I have no idea what to say to you, I’ll be super honest dude, but—but I’m here for you. We’re here for you. Take as long as you need, okay?”

Sniffling, her grieving friend nodded feebly—her normally cheery face looking sunken and washed out, her light brown eyes hollow and reddened. Satya stood up from where she and Hana sat on the tiled bathroom floor with Brigitte, and offered her hands to help pull up the tortured soul. Shaking hands took the offer shyly, and Hana pat the fellow student firmly on the back, holding it there to help guide her out “C’mon, let’s just turn our brains off and either watch Impotent Rage or play some RTS games—or shit, just, whatever y’wanna do okay?”

“We can do nothing if you want that,” Satya added quietly, when Brigitte was not so forthcoming with a response.

To that though, there were still no words uttered, but another weak nod. What they were not privy to, was the swirl of poisonous self-hate being converted into the ultimate thirst for vengeance. Brigitte Lindholm had never once in her life wanted to emotionally nor mentally hurt another human being in all of her 23 years of living.

Now, for the very first time, she wanted to break this psychopath’s neck and watch the life drain from her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOB's name in this fic is obv not canon but done in a way to gently nod to Ashe's full name. The old money they're from have to have a tree-species themed surname with an obtuse Old Latin Name For X Country as a middle name I suppose.  
> anyway with the rest of the fic content it's just [always sunny theme intensifies]  
> i say i write a shorter fic but if i spaced the chapters out like i did the other two fics this would probably be 20smth chapters from all the word vomit this seems to just generate.  
> also i super wasn't kidding about those dark interpersonal conflict tags.


	7. Collision Course

_Message left… 09, 21, am._

_If through some miracle you manage to grab Sombra, shake her down for information. Last I heard from Ogundimu whilst I was helping him with trying to get her back, she cuddled up to a few government agents. I’m going to hazard a guess that she’ll be in proximity to Lacroix still as well, so despite Sombra covering her tracks, Lacroix is harder to do that for. I’m aware you have mild history via Amari sharpshooting lessons, but your pay check hangs in the balance on your ability to get that fucking Swiss doctor, so don’t let familiarity impede you._

-

It took Ashe a couple of relistens for that message to sink in, given she’d spent the day before getting _absolutely_ blackout drunk alone in her Rockford Dorset hotel room to try and forget what she did and who she was. The next day was spent hugging the toilet in the most nightmarish hangover she ever had the misfortune of incurring on herself, but by then the hint that Moira left had taken. There was little chance of her grabbing a hacker who covered her tracks, but there was _every_ bit of chance of sifting through clues and cues hidden among the social media wasteland of LifeInvader and Bleeter to narrow down the location of Amélie Lacroix (or Amélie Guillard-Lacroix, going by her privately set LifeInvader account, with a picture of a far more tired Frenchwoman than Ashe remembered, yet smiling softly with a rather loudly dressed and styled woman adorned in purple).

Cross referencing took about 3 or 4 hours all told, but between clawing through image searches and maps, she narrowed the location down to Mirror Park someplace, and Amélie’s occupation as a some-time Dryft driver. Another day of sleep would be needed before she would venture out into the city once more, using the Dryft app to take a car over there and planning to try sussing out the specifics of Amélie’s location through occasional co-workers. The driver that ferried her over knew enough to say that the company milked her notoriety for all it was worth, eagerly setting up packages for those morbidly inclined tourists that wanted to get into a car with a known, proven assassin—who despite her protesting that she’d left that far in the past behind her, still unwillingly drew such crowds.

“Now just on Glory Way, she’s over on West Mirror Drive there, but I’ll drop you here since the residents have a shitfit about any Downtown cabs in the vicinity, and I’d rather not get my license taken away again.” The driver’s previous incident was framed in such a way that he was begging for more conversation with his attractive passenger, but Ashe was devoid of interest, pinning her hair back and donning her indie wishy-washy disguise once more to stalk the street for signs of Amélie Lacroix. An actual reunion with another sharpshooter student of Ana Amari’s would have to wait if hell froze over and she could come back to this city after all was said and done for Moira, but the affluent biker knew better— Bob’s affliction would be spontaneously cured sooner than she could ever come back to a place where her covering trails had started to morph into outright bridge-burning.

Behind large aviators, her ruby eyes flitted back and forth across the road for the familiar beanpole-like figure that moved with the grace of a ballet dancer, keeping her walking pace steady but not too slow as to attract suspicion. When a car pulled into its driveway on this quiet afternoon, Ashe paid it little heed until that elegant frame stepped out with some urgent purpose, watching Amélie all but run towards a woman who peered out of the front door with an impish grin. The slip of purple confirmed it, and Ashe crossed the road when the two had hidden themselves in the house once more.

Her pumps made little noise compared to the clacking her heeled boots would normally yield against concrete, perfect for this endeavour. The Deadlock MC president kept a low profile, and avoided lines of sight feasible from the front window in her approach; she gently tested the front door and found there was no lock. Confused, Ashe waited a minute to listen out and ensure they were well away from this front door before trying the knob, which opened pliantly for her. Murmuring kept Ashe on her toes, but the sounds seemed confined to the one corner of the house. Looking around, there were a couple of shopping bags neglected on the tiled floor of the hallway-kitchen-living space in this tiny house, and a phone abandoned on a circular table…unlocked and staring at the ceiling with its home screen on full, interactable display.

_Well that made things easier_ , the silver-haired woman noted dryly, plucking up the vulnerable slab of tech and poking around it for information. Texts first, and through some cursory reading in which she failed to comprehend the Latin-American brand of Spanish bar excruciatingly basic words, Ashe managed to pinpoint the phone owner as Olivia, and more intriguingly, that she was the widow’s new girlfriend. As casual meetups and discussions across private messaging and emails unfolded to her, linking the late ‘Lena’ to the name ‘Tracer’ and finding the reappearance of the nickname ‘Pharah’ which tied itself apparently to none other than Fareeha Amari…who was dating Angela.

Ashe grimaced. _Why the fuck was this city so big if it turned out everyone was goddamn linked tighter than them chainmail suits shark divers wear?_ If anything, she probably needed something like that given how this seemed to go from bad to worse with every subsequent adventure for more information she went on _. Of course_ , her old sharpshooter mentor’s quiet daughter would grow up to be banging the target she needed to grab. _Of course_ , she was finding this information out by breaking into her old classmate-of-sorts’ house and looking at said classmate’s girlfriend’s phone. _Of course_ , the owner of the phone was tight with a **fucking English MI7 agent.**

Fuck my life, Ashe thought. There were so many storeys to go with this tower of _fuck_ that her life had morphed into but ruminating in the spider’s web would probably be the last mistake she’d make. She combed through the phone for more things pertaining to Angela Ziegler—Angela _fucking_ Ziegler, supposedly looking like a namesake from on high and just as barely extant from her experience, but she was determined not to leave this house until something gave her a sign.

There was a sudden yelp from the room and Ashe froze stock still, straining her ear to desperately clarify what had happened, and if there were any movements towards where she currently stood. She heard a whirl of cursing, and a husky chuckle afterwards.

“Guess my ribs’re still delicate from that slap Akande gave me back when, huh?”

“Olivia, love, do you want me to go slower?”

“Might be for the best. I do wanna make the most of all the time I got with you, _ara_ _ña_.”

Pausing just to make sure there was no change in their positions, Ashe’s ears instead registered something decidedly more intimate idly drifting from the adjacent room, something further clarified by a lot of close bordering on lusty pictures of both an older Amélie than what Ashe was used to, and this Olivia. Wasn’t she—? Well, no, just as Ashe’s thought was about to turn to aghast realisation, time as a passing concept reintroduced itself and she remembered that Mr Lacroix had been dead for a number of years. The older woman poked through the phone, speedreading texts and emails for the magic keywords that would get her that lifeline, that access to the elusive Angela Ziegler, though simultaneously sneaking closer to the room just to make sure her ears were not deceiving her. Bedsprings creaked at a particularly obvious pace, and given she was hearing English in two different husky accents peppered by French and Spanish, it sounded like Amélie was having the time of her life underneath Olivia. Not that Ashe was being voyeuristic; her stomach turned with the thought of any sort of intimacy after the last encounter she had with the _continental_ baggage attached to it.

Remorse for her past actions certainly plagued her, but nothing ever sunk itself so troublingly deep into her psyche like the complexities spiralling from her coupling with Brigitte Lindholm merely days after murdering the young woman’s father. Something malevolent in that tragedy of human relationships bled some Freudian nonsense, but she was in no mood to engage, simply wishing she had never even dared to flirt with the girl who had to have been grieving and **_oh god_** what kind of monster was she? As much as the joy that Amélie found a will to live and a woman to live for settled in the back of her mind, the biker felt so _nauseated_ by intimacy, what with her own transgressions against all that was good with the concept of love and lovemaking.

The texts thankfully began to turn up some gold nuggets that she could use for the search; chats involving a Hana Song and a Satya Vaswani turned up some pictures here and there showing them with Amélie and Olivia at various gatherings, dinners, general hanging out. Where had she heard that name before? The thought lingered, sticking in the corner of her mind like an uncomfortable splinter under her skin, as she poured over the texts:

** -} ChatterApp **

PRIVATE MESSAGING – 8 Days Ago –

**D.VA:** hey fuckass

**D.VA:** I know the bae hates the idea of cursing so I’ll do it on her behalf but don’t fuckin ride the baguette til your ribs knit together

**SOMBRA:** lmao she’s one to talk

**SOMBRA:** didn’t she literally get down on you when you self-owned on the boat almost a year ago

_D.VA sent a photo_

**SOMBRA:** lmfao flipping me off just confirms she did

**SOMBRA:** besides dw about it

**SOMBRA:** your sexsurgeon’s bestie Angela twisted some arms and got me some baller painkillers

**SOMBRA:** I’ll survive

**D.VA:** sexsurgeon was the best you could come up with for satya

**D.VA:** here I was considering calling u smth other than fuckass and other choice insults

**D.VA:** gonna double down instead

**SOMBRA:** <3 u too bonita

**-}** _ENTER MESSAGE…_

Ashe quirked her brow. This Satya might be her best opportunity to pry Angela out of whatever cubbyhole she got stuck in. Scrolling back through the messages, looking for Satya and any address pertaining to her, the biker managed to get a bead on the Vinewood Hills just as Amélie cried out in her earthshattering orgasm. It was a fucking miracle Ashe didn’t drop the phone through her panicked fumbling, instead locking it and slipping out of the house, sprinting away like a spooked mare. Still, she had what she needed.

All she had to do was to find this Satya…

* * *

“Brigitte— ** _Brigitte!_** You can’t lift that!”

Despite Zarya’s speed, her bulk meant she was just a hair’s breadth too late to wholly prevent the girl from trying to lift a bar with weights some 5kg above what she was capable of. To Brigitte’s credit, she managed to get the bar to her shoulders and into the squat but had Zarya not taken the bar, she would have absolutely blown her kneecaps out in totality.

“You can’t keep doing this,” the Russian scolded; the tone would normally be gentle, but she had steel in her melodic accent knowing why she threw herself into this “You’re going to permanently damage your body.”

She staggered back to the rack where she placed the bar safely. Zarya dusted her palms off after securing the weights, looking at the fuming, panting Swede “My protégé… look, I somewhat understand where your mind is at, as much as I could get when Jesse went on his silly rampage, but you’re _killing_ yourself here. I know you’re probably not going to listen to reason much like he wouldn’t--.”

“No offence, but you haven’t lost either of your parents, and secondly if you did, you sure as hell wouldn’t have ended up fucking their killer,” Brigitte hissed dangerously “I’m going to **destroy** her.”

“Well you’d better go home and rest first,” Zarya gruffly stated, joining the two and firmly grabbing the younger woman’s shoulders with a grasp too tight to be anything less than a warning “I’m going to ask you to leave for today if you try push yourself. Besides, from what little I know of this murderer, she is small and frail already—you could snap her as is. This will only cripple you before you get your hands on her, yes?”

Just that dose of logic was enough to persuade Brigitte to see the sense required in the Russian’s words, numbing her incandescent fury to simmering under the surface. She nodded once, briskly and mutely, turning on her heel to go home and to pray for another chance to cross paths with that scumbag. All Zarya could do was wilt a little, dismayed at how the turmoil of the last fortnight had taken its toll on her lifting apprentice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this particular chapter was extremely difficult to write hence the sudden brakes slammed on the rapid updates, but hopefully the next couple of chapters will be a tad more cooperative.


	8. Close Encounter

_How in the fuckin’ hell was it so difficult to get tranquilisers?!_

In Los Santos, bullets were easier to pick up with less red tape, and that painted a suitably _rosy_ picture of society at large here in the sunny state of San Andreas. Regardless, with a few well-placed bribes she eventually greased the chemists and pharmacists (couldn’t go over a certain dosage in the one location) collectively of their stocks. The better part of an afternoon was spent carefully measuring out the pros and cons of sedatives versus paralysis agents, and while on the phone with an uncomfortably obliging Moira who coolly talked her into carrying both sets but perhaps on opposite sides to prevent mixing them up and accidentally killing the recipient. The mission was to find and kidnap Satya for the time being, which she related to the Irish geneticist while playing chemistry in her 5-star hotel room.

A dark thought crossed her mind, pondering overdosage as a preferable option than following through the shit this Old-World asshole was putting her through. She banished it with a weak shake of her head while changing shoulders that she was cradling her mobile to her ear with.

“So that catalyst agent is s’posed to speed shit up, right? And th’other trade-off with that’s the fact that it means whoever gets injected with it can come around sooner than the normal dosage would allow fer?”

“Yep, you’re catching on fast. Now, time’s of the essence pet; get that lovely surgeon and we’ll be on course to get Angela back. Why; I think with her expertise we could perhaps devise something that would permanently halt Robert’s deterioration.”

 _Well, there was the carrot after all that fucking stick_. Ashe said nothing bar an affirmative grunt of ‘later’, hanging up and placing the newly put together syringes of sedatives in one padded case and paralysing syringes in another. Using some tweaked utility pouches, she slung one around her left leg, the other on her right, attaching them to her belt and making sure to pat her left leg for ‘Port Paralysis’ and right for ‘Starboard Sedatives’ for a weak mnemonic to remember what was sitting where.

As Ashe headed out in her dubious-attention-attracting garb of ‘cowboy undertaker’, she had a fleeting thought of self-derision for drawing on that particular childhood memory. Sipping on soda while on the deck of her family’s hulking yacht while a member of crew explained nautical terms, something that she rolled her eyes at later in life, but the idyllic nature and the innocence was heaving with appeal right now. She knew she wouldn’t be getting any taste of that naivety any time soon.

* * *

Hana hadn’t been able to focus on her streams much in the chaos of the last two weeks, between actual scheduled events, the handful of university related nonsense like lectures and two one-on-one sessions with a tutor describing why her project was coming along so slowly in the vacuum of education. She endeavoured to try break that particular negative habit, reaching deep within to claw at some kind of enthusiasm that lingered, throwing herself into the finer details of glitch.tv setup. Every monitor in its right place, every internal component temperature stat on the touchscreen she mounted above her tri-screen set up, the microphone angled right and the camera too. It had been a while, so Hana had to test the audio mixing with the game more than she’d liked.

But there was the sound of something scrabbling at the roof tiles above, and it was getting above irritating. She doffed the chunky headphones from her head, sighing dramatically while opening the window “Is it some dumb fucking bird?”

She didn’t react quick enough for the sight of a figure in heeled boots swinging in from above, kicking her square in the chest and knocking her to the floor. Hana didn’t even get a chance to launch to her feet and fight the intruder, who had instantly climbed onto her, pinning her down with the advantage of weight slightly in their favour. Not only that, but she wasn’t even able to roar in defiance, with a gloved palm clamped around her mouth, but at least the gamer was now able to identify just who exactly it was reaching for something on their leg.

A flurry of numbing comprehension, nauseating panic, and hot anger made itself known in the Korean, as her eyes widened taking in the person of interest whose description had floated around her in steadily growing specificity, with more striking traits than any of those eyewitness accounts had noted. Blood red eyes stared down at her and Hana made a muffled noise of fury and panic when she felt something thin and metallic sink beneath her skin.

“Don’t worry your lil’ head sweetheart,” this woman, the killer of Torbjörn and Lena alike, purred quietly “This ain’t gonna hurt, just gonna make y’sleep a lil’ bit while I have words with that surgeon y’got in here.”

Even as chemicals began to float about her bloodstream and disrupt the frantic synapse firing in every nerve of the gamers, roaring at her to fight back and to save her hard-won domestic life with someone she cared and loved as fiercely as a tigress, Hana struggled harder than Ashe expected, but to little avail. The albinistic woman watched her, keeping firmly from where she sat, until Hana’s eyes glazed over and her limbs stopped moving, with the breath just above Ashe’s gloved hand slowing to a rhythmic slumberous pace.

Satisfied, Ashe dismounted, standing up and slowly opening the door to the main hall of the open-plan Vinewood Hills home, to see a woman already approaching with dread that was already in her face accelerating to greater horror seeing the girl on the floor.

“Did you—Did you kill her too!?”

Ashe pulled out a pistol and pointed it at Hana’s prone body on the floor “No, but I can change that if y’don’t cooperate. She’s just asleep.”

There was no answer, but the rather hypnotising golden eyes of this strikingly beautiful woman bore a hole in the MC President’s skull. Ashe looked over her curiously, the name in the back of her mind matching this intriguing figure just as much as the stinging splinter of vague familiarity annoying her with it.

“Satya, right?”

“Satya Vaswani, yes. Are you here to kill me then, if not Hana?”

“That’s Hana then? The ‘one and only D.Va’ them signs were talkin’ about? Neat.” The billboards around town still stood, with that girl’s face on it. Ashe holstered her pistol and walked towards Satya slowly “You’re comin’ with me, sorry.”

Something coloured the surgeon’s brilliant tiger-like eyes, disdain wrinkling her nose ever so slightly and her lip curled with faint, restrained malice “You’re the woman who hurt Brigitte so, didn’t you.”

It was said as a statement rather than a question, and it was enough to make the splinter of the name ‘Satya’ lacerate when it stung only previously. Ashe remembered now. This was the name Brigitte whined out when they were having sex rather than her own, and a heavy weight sat in her chest, sinking and sinking in her body, dragging her soul and determination downwards when she realised she was face-to-face with the enchanting owner of the name. If nothing else, she certainly saw why the girl was infatuated enough to have her name unconsciously on the tip of her tongue, even if that _hurt_ to acknowledge.

“…I—I s’pose I did. But _yer_ the one she really yearns for, ain’tcha?” she fired back, though with all the hearty strength of a limp punch, knowing she had little to stand on. Even so, that still sucked the fight out of Satya herself, looking at the ground as if ruminating on her own ties to the woefully unlucky mechanic. It was a bizarre situation that they recognised they were in, tense and dangerous as it was, there was something so earnestly civil about the exchange in realising what parts they had to play in this sordid misery their ‘mutual’ was drowning in. Ashe smiled weakly “I can definitely see why she likes ya so much. That lil spitfire snoozin’ on the ground’s crazy lucky to have snatched you up, huh?”

“Indeed, but neither myself nor Hana like putting Brigitte in such a tough place,” Satya answered evenly as she could, fingers curling into fists. Ashe understood.

The older woman then nodded, stepping towards her slowly, just as the sound of keys twisting in the door made itself heard. The two froze in place, though Ashe also whipped her pistol out quick sharp and pointed it towards Satya—though in actuality she had pointed it _sufficiently_ away from her that she wouldn’t hit should the trigger be pulled. Not that it mattered to Brigitte though, who swung the door open in time to see Satya Vaswani having a gun pulled on her by the same woman who killed her father, and who she had the cruellest misfortune of fucking in a fancy hotel the day before he was laid to rest.

“ ** _You…_** ”

Satya glanced quickly between Ashe and Brigitte, noting how full of emotion they were—never mind how different, they were mutually as intense. There was a certain degree that she recalled seeing the lost expression on Ashe’s face, but it was usually on the person who currently bore one made of wrought-iron hatred.

“Brigitte, darlin’—this ain’t… _none_ o’this is what I ever wanted t’do—.”

It was when Satya’s current abductor-in-the-making held out a hand towards the molten inferno that was the Swede otherwise, that Satya recognised the expression on Ashe as one she normally knew on Brigitte as the longing the mechanic had towards her, and bitterness for the whims of life in this cruel city made itself known to the surgeon. She called the mechanic ‘darling’ in a way that radiated a fondness with the same longing that Brigitte would direct towards her instead, but all that the girl had for Ashe was unbridled fury.

“ ** _You fucking monster!_** ”

Brigitte roared in an anger tempered by loss and self-destructive sorrow, running towards her in the same second that Ashe raised her gun upwards away from Satya’s general direction. Instead of even daring to use the gun, Ashe checked the safety and flung it away over the surgeon’s head, letting the raging brunette close the distance, barrelling into her and bringing her to the ground. Just as Brigitte reared back to get a good look at the woman who took the idea of a normal day-to-day life from her in less than a week, she found something sinking into her neck.

Despite the concoction getting to work and dimming her senses as soon as Ashe’s thumb pressed hard on the syringe plunger, Brigitte’s eyes, ablaze with disarming ferocity, took in the look of fear gazing back up at her from the floor framed by a remorseful, furrowed brow. Before she could even hope to summon the strength to move her arms to throttle the pinned murderer beneath her, Brigitte focus wavered, and she passed out. Had Ashe not caught her, her head would have struck the edge of a nearby glass coffee table, but instead she was embraced in her unconsciousness, and gently moved to lie on her side on the floor.

Satya had watched the entire thing, from the way Ashe took such great pains avoiding harming the Swedish girl, to the way she tenderly lay her down on the floor in a placement that would ensure she wouldn’t choke in her forcefully administered slumber. She held her tongue, even when the woman lingered enough to brush strands out of the knocked-out mechanic’s face, before quietly ordering Satya outside and down the road to where she had parked the car replacing her bike nearby.

There was no verbal exchange until they were well on their way to wherever the malevolent Moira had entombed herself in, until Satya felt brave enough to find her voice again.

“The way you looked at her.”

“What about it?”

Satya glanced at her reserved captor, who resolutely stared ahead as she drove.

“I’ve seen her look at me like that.”

There was a prolonged, pregnant silence. The Indian felt danger amplify around her as she merely even contemplated the question she was about to ask, never mind the actual act of asking it.

“Do you… do you have feelings for Brigitte?”

Ashe sighed abruptly, heavily, pulling the car over and braking for a second. Her surgeon captive tilted her head.

“Listen, Ms Vaswani, we can do this either one of two ways. Either I can sedate ya right the fuck now so you don’t get under my skin with those pointed questions or ya can do it yerself as a trained medical professional, orrrr you can keep yer very pretty trap shut.”

“I’m a surgeon, not a trained anaesthetist.”

There was another stiff sigh, as Ashe grumbled in plucking one of the last couple of sedative syringes from the pouch on her leg and grabbed Satya by the collar, jamming it into her jugular.

* * *

“Oh, she’s waking up!”

“Easy Hana, you only just woke up too.”

Brigitte blinked, before shutting her eyes tightly and grimacing in pain as her stiff body began aching in protest at movement. When her vision gained focus, she was surrounded by concerned faces that were mostly of the Amari clan, both by blood and by other connection. The foremost of these was the sour look of Fareeha Amari, something Brigitte matched when she made sure to sit the fuck up and shove the Egyptian out of the way. Hana blinked, the similarity between the stern looks both her eomma and her bestie had was enough to delay the realisation that Satya was gone.

“Brigs, you’re doing that thing Jesse was half a year ago.”

“I told Zarya this, and I’m telling you this; at least no one here had to lose a parent to a murderer they ended up **_FUCKING!_** ”

Angela sighed wearily from where she stood by Hana, checking that she wasn’t hurt beyond the initial kick to the chest. Unfortunately for the Korean, the impact suffered aggravated old wounds; her ribs were bruised, and it hurt a little more than she liked given they were the same she had broken almost a year ago, making itself known when the gamer attempted to move towards Brigitte. Her ‘eomma #2’ bid her to stay still with no more than a firm hand on her shoulder, and she complied. The other woman with the title of ‘eomma’ pursed her lips, mulling over what to say next to the fuming Swede, who spoke before her.

“Listen, I appreciate your concern, but you don’t understand. I have to stop her for good; it’s more personal for me than whatever Jesse had—he didn’t accidentally _blow_ Akande, did he?”

“ _Yallah_ , Brigitte--!” Fareeha grimaced, the choice of words a little too visual-friendly for her liking.

“It’s gonna take more than this intervention. I’m going; she’s got Satya and I couldn’t fucking live with myself if anything happened to her.”

“ ** _Fucking--!_** Me too you _fuckbench_ , that’s my girlfriend the psycho’s got!” Hana added, lively when she recalled just what was on the line. Brigitte sat up, pushing Fareeha out of the way and groggily making her way out of the Shimada complex, something that only occurred to the vengeful mechanic when she ran into confused looking aides and staff in a very Eastern décor-clad office.

“So you have those Australians helping him today then?”

“Reinhardt thinks he’s younger than he is. Those two will make the boat maintenance a lot easier on his back--.”

Ana walked towards the large room with Hanzo by her side, the two feeling a gust of wind rush by them as the Swede stormed out. A glance was exchanged, with the Shimada heir’s worry countered by enigmatic amusement by the retired mercenary “Hmm… that’s a strut and a scowl I know well.”

They joined the group, just in time for Fareeha to be making her way towards the door. Spotting her mother, the pilot hesitated a moment, nodding towards the hallway “I’ve got to stop Brigitte. Jesse lost his arm doing this shit, and considering what else she’s got on the line, I’m afraid she’s gonna lose more than a limb doing this fatherly vengeance shit.”

Hanzo’s offer of backup Shimada men went unheard, when Ana shook her head “The old stubby ram raised quite the lioness. I don’t know if you’ll be able to reel her in, little griffon.”

Her daughter frowned. While the return to the usage of gratuitous symbolism in Ana’s nicknames meant for somewhat of a return to form, the pilot didn’t like the challenge inferred “I don’t care if what you’re trying to imply is that she’s adopted or whatever the fuck, Brigitte’s reasons are the same as Jesse’s and I’m not gonna let her get mangled if I can fucking _help_ it.”

“Then go and do your best to corral her,” Ana conceded, gesturing towards the hall that her daughter shortly stomped down. Hanzo merely gave his older Egyptian charge a quirked brow that politely requested answers that she was not so forthcoming with, simply giving him a quiet chuckle instead.

“Tigerli, all I ask is that you don’t throw yourself into a fight, and you keep back,” Angela murmured, embracing Hana closely but gently to prevent annoying the aching ribcage of her Korean charge. “I want Satya back safely almost as much as you and Brigitte do, but I don’t want to worry about losing you as well, okay?”

“Yeah eomma, I learned my lesson the last coupla times.”

“You say that,” Angela began, stepping back from the gamer with a weak smile “But I know you’ve got too much of a warrior’s spirit to truly let that lesson sink in, hmm?”

Hana grinned with unabashed pride at that comment “That warrior’s spirit is what’s gonna get Satya back and keep us all in one piece, promise!”

She walked towards the doorway where Ana still stood, while Hanzo approached Angela to have a hushed conversation about options of relocation to more secretive Shimada safehouses. The Merryweather veteran gave Hana a warm smile and an encouraging squeeze of her hand on the girl’s shoulder “Go get your fellow tigress back.”

“About the animal symbolism shit,” Hana broached the subject, hanging back with her halmeoni “I know who corresponds to what but like, rams don’t just have lionesses for kids. Was Brigs… actually adopted?”

Ana’s lone eye glanced away as she searched for the best way to approach this topic, given it was not really hers to divulge “…not adopted, no, but she shares blood with someone closer to home than you realise.”

“Closer to home, but she’s not…” Hana began.

“No, you’d be able to tell.”

The gamer’s thought process clicked this way and that, as she combed through various permutations and possibilities until the only conclusion she could make ended up being blurted out aloud with a frustrated sigh “ _Fucking_ white people.”

Imagine her scandalised surprise, when the normally resolutely anti-cursing Egyptian mercenary echoed her thought with a tired but cheerful smile “Fucking white people.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic continues the now established canon that Hana 'D.Va' Song is more than just capable, she is eager to fight people older and more experienced in the art of taking lives than she is.


	9. Change Of Heart

The bright light on her lids stirred her awake just as much as the coarse scent of strong tobacco filtering into her nose did. Satya shut her lids tightly, blinking steadily as consciousness returned, keeping her eyes squinted with the sharp sting of halogen scalding her delicate vision.

“Well, isn’t it about time y’joined the rest of us.”

The accent was foreign, one that Satya had brief experience of in her dizzying ascent up through further education, Irish students from the old university of the Emerald Isle’s capital city with the same thirst for knowledge as she had. All pleasant sorts, if a little hard to approach given their work hard, play hard style. But this accent, hewn from the stern views of a generation plighted by gutting emigration, coloured Gaelic discontent with Gallic deserters, held nothing of the stereotype of approachability her countrymen would have.

“Satya Vaswani, right?” the voice asked, as the bearer of the name tries to focus on the silhouette lurking around the halogen light’s periphery.

“Who are you?”

Her captor leaned in, and the light caught the strands in a way that her heterochromatic interrogator wore a halo of violent flame.

“ _I’m_ asking the questions, pet.” She blew smoke into Satya’s face for her audacity in daring to broach a counter question. “Let’s try again: Satya Vaswani, _right?_ ”

“Y…yes.” The surgeon, sputtering, looked around at where she was, realising she was bound tightly to the chair she was upright in, and a tray was situated just out of reach by this redhead who radiated nothing but malevolent intent. Atop the tray were a host of tools she knew well in the theatre; all surgery grade implements that she had often used on whichever patient had the fortune to have her as the lead practitioner. But that bode ill for her immediate future, when she took all the setting into consideration.

Outside the small disused warehouse, Ashe leaned against the door with her shoulders up and her arms around herself, trying to ignore the fell cold that slipped beneath her skin. In the daylight, this would be sweltering and unyielding, but when there was no cloud cover the heat just evaporated away. She felt the chill worse than usual tonight too, and though she’d been told to keep watch for any trespassers, Ashe knew this lonely corner of Los Santos County well enough to know people ignored the threatening shell of closed businesses without urban sprawl reassurance around them. She then decided to step back in, muttering an ‘all clear’ so Moira couldn’t protest the re-entry too much. The albinistic woman folded her arms, looking on as her benefactor paced around the imprisoned Satya, looking for something and mumbling to herself in wholesale conversation. Satya’s eyes by now had adjusted to the harsh lighting, and her vision was good enough to pick Ashe’s form out nearby.

“Elizabeth, where in the name of God did you put the anaesthesia?”

“Crate’s by the door here,” Ashe answered, not even willing to rebuke her employer for using her first name rather than her preferred surname. “What’re y’gonna do?”

“Ms Vaswani is going to be a good girl and talk,” Moira replied, prying the nails from the wooden lid with a neglected hammer that was sitting atop of it, and then coaxing the lid open “Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll need to play hardball if she doesn’t—but I’ll give her plenty of opportunity. I don’t think I’m worried about any interruptions.”

Ashe watched, unmoving from where she had initially slipped in, as Moira took samples of the liquid numbing agent with a few syringes not unlike the pack that the biker had utilised earlier in the day, puffing away until her cigarette was at its very last dregs. Red made contact with tiger-gold that pleaded with her in silence to do something, but she remained where she was, mostly to see where the disgraced medical professional went with this.

“Now! Satya, pet, are you friends with an Angela Ziegler? Simple yes or no answer if you don’t want to get too wordy.”

“…yes.”

“Good lass,” Moira chuckled, arranging the newly finished anaesthetic dosages by the tools on the tray, tapping it as she discarded the cigarette butt to the floor “Best friends? Well acquainted with her to know where she might be hiding?”

Satya eyed the faux friendly woman towering over her, swallowing the fear that bubbled within— the Vagos kidnapping was one thing, but at least those men were far easier to read in their hostility than this praying mantis of a person. “No, I don’t. Forgive me for asking but, do _you_ know her?”

A deeply uncomfortable minute elapsed in which Ashe feared Moira snapping or reacting violently, but she held her sigh of relief well noting that the Irish woman instead offered a chortle “Of course I do pet, I’m the person who got her that practicing license because she did me a favour.”

“And that woman with the white hair and red eyes?”

“An assistant to try seek out Angela were other avenues not as forthcoming, and she’s doing a good job of hunting down the leads I give her.”

The woman in question felt her ears twig on that, and a dark curiosity settled in her stomach, the growing clutch on her gut giving her the push, the incentive of seeking opportunity to try and delay whatever plan Moira had “Hey, just real quick big shot O’Deorain?”

She scowled, interrupted mid-syringe preparation “What do you want now, Elizabeth?”

“Speakin’ of them leads,” the biker began, putting her hands on her hips as she watched Moira turn back to her trapped prey to prod her further “Hey, you listenin?”

Satya yelped as she wriggled her arm away from the jabs the Irish captor attempted, having enough leeway to move her arm from the elbow and have a wide arc to evade it. With an irritated grunt, the older woman gave up on doing this piecemeal, and opted to lodge the paralysis syringe in the surgeon’s upper arm, almost at the shoulder, eliciting a sharp cry “ _Nowwww_ , there we go. I’m going to need you to behave and answer all my questions, or I’m going to chip away at you, okay?”

“Don’t—don’t do this, _please_!”

“Moira y’fuckin’ lanky-ass shit-eating crackheap, you **_listen to me!_** ”

The insult was sufficient in drawing the hypnotic stare of her employer, but her tone was galvanised by the same ominous edge her glare held “ ** _What?_** ”

Silence was peppered by Satya’s hyperventilating, as red held mismatched red-and-blue to a standstill, as Ashe retained steely composure “So, just about them leads… Real quick, how extensive is your know-how on this city? ‘Specially since yer from that island of alcohol poisonin’ and not even from the US of A.”

“ _What?_ ” Moira repeated, this time in incredulity “D’you think I just fell out of a fucking tree yesterday? I was privy to the vast maps and intel Sombra had as part of Talon; I didn’t just goldfish that out of my head. I still remember entire scientific essays I wrote 25 years ago. The who’s and where’s and what’s don’t leave me so easy.”

She patted the tray for a long scalpel and with an angry grunt, one laden with indignance that she would even be capable of forgetting menial details when she was capable of regurgitating by heart vast tracts on the benefits of gene therapy and designer inheritance that she had written herself, plunged it into Satya’s hand and pinning it to the chair arm beneath. Under Satya’s horrified shriek (at the sight of it, given that the nerves had been unresponsive), Moira muttered to herself at Ashe’s nonsense in suggesting she wouldn’t simply know things, she knew everything. In the surgeon’s panic, something overloaded her brain and inverted her fear, with little left open to her and with few options for escape, Satya spat “Did you know about the Lindholms then? If you know everything like you say you do, you _psycho!_ ”

“Lindholms? Satya, pet, of _course_ ,” Moira grinned, sweet and saccharine to the point of pure rot “I know all about them with that old short fuck Torbjörn having ties to Merryweather. The brief time I was part of that, I did all my homework on everyone linked to that great PMC in the sky.”

Satya embraced the gambit she was about to commit, seeing as Moira gloated freely about her knowledge whereas the statement stuck with Ashe in a way that made the already albinistic woman go shades paler than humanly possible. The Irishwoman plucked up what looked like a cleaver, weighing it in hand, never one for physical violence, but there would be a first time for everything, as her prisoner quickly added “Never mind Torbjörn, did you know of his children? His youngest, Brigitte?”

“Studying engineering in ULSA, best friends with famous glitch.tv streamer D.Va, yes, yes, I know. Big burly lass with the same playfulness and naivety as a golden retriever; your point?”

Summoning the courage that Hana bore in the face of adversity, the bravery Fareeha exhibited on an impossibly regular basis when Talon first began to stir, Satya mustered the tranquillity of an undisturbed lake in her expression and voice. She spared a glance over towards Ashe, who was visibly struggling with a number of questions that surged forth, and perhaps this nudging would be her catalyst to freedom.

“You… how long’ve you known about Brigitte?” Ashe asked, her voice strained and weak in comparison to how her body framed itself in a simmering, growing fury.

Moira was too busy measuring out her swing, and picking between the numbed digits on Satya’s left hand, pinned by scalpel, to screen her response to the biker the way she would have otherwise “Jesus, since Hana Song popped up on the Talon servers; put it together.”

“Oh, I put it together alright.”

Satisfied with the pinkie finger and taking aim, the former Talon member raised the cleaver but a sudden force and loud noise accompanying it took it out of her hand. Satya yelped, and Moira looked behind her quick enough to see Ashe thunder into her with gun in hand and charge her into a wall with a furious cry. The redhead winced as she felt her skull smack against concrete, distantly acknowledging the sound of the cleaver dropping to the floor with a spent bullet casing, squinting down at her now turncoat hired hand who had both of hers on her collar.

“Y’knew about Brigitte that night!? Y’knew, and y’still fucking egged me on?! **_What the fuck is wrong with you!??_** ”

She only received token efforts to struggle free, and a disinterested roll of mismatched eyes “Oh please, like you wouldn’t have fucked that idiot girl anyway with the way you were going on about her.”

“I didn’t say much about her, actually,” Ashe hissed, bracing her left forearm against Moira’s collarbone and freeing up her other hand to pat at her leg’s syringe pouches “But y’knew who Brigitte was, and to get some twisted fuckin’ amusement, you fuckin revelled in goadin’ me on. Why didn’tya tell me I killed that girl’s pa? Didja _want_ me to be in that real fine mess I’m in with her?!”

The fuming president of the Deadlock MC, with her hackles raised and her chest heaving with the effort of using paced breathing to maintain vague control over her primal want to tear this bitch apart, got nothing but a sinister serpentine smile.

“You say that like ye really fell for her. What a lovely coincidence.”

Channelling the same rage as a cornered mountain lion, Ashe yanked the final sedative from the pouch and jammed it into Moira’s neck, emptying its payload into her bloodstream and holding her there until she watched the twisted excuse of a human succumb to its effects. Letting the older woman drop in a heap unceremoniously to the ground, the biker turned her attention to the grimacing surgeon who felt the slow pull in her arm like the local anaesthesia there was beginning to let up.

“Hey, let me get you out of that.”

“S…Sure, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Ashe muttered, untying Satya and pulling the scalpel out of her hand “I’ll treat this too; I saw an abandoned lookin’ first aid in one o’the rooms nearby.”

Her disappearance from the surgeon’s side was brief, but before too long she had returned and went about her self-assigned job with aplomb, disinfecting and bandaging up the wound neatly and firmly.

“There we go. Hey, uh… I know I ain’t in a position to do this, but I wanna ask you a favour real quick.”

Satya’s golden eyes narrowed.

“I’m callin’ time with helping this fucking lunatic out, so I’m gonna actually wrap her up all nice and deliver her straight t’that Angela lady. Thing is I’m pretty sure none of ‘em have any reason to trust my word, and I definitely get why. Can y’stick out a night? I’ll arrange a meeting to hand you n’ Moira over, and give you the mouthpiece. They’re gonna trust your word over mine easy. And by the by, I ain’t limitin’ the company Angie can bring neither, she can bring her girlfriend, she can bring the Korean hothead, she can bring—she can bring _her_ —or hell, she can take the whole complement o’Shimada suits if she really fuckin’ wants.”

“Somehow I don’t think she will,” Satya interjected, mulling briefly who the ‘her’ referred to “But… that reasoning tracks. I’ll do that much--.”

She trailed off, going back to her mind and recalling how Ashe took great pains in gently lying Brigitte down after sedating her, compared to how she let Moira risk concussions and further injury with great indifference. She took note of how viciously Ashe fought when Moira revealed her true colours, and her hopelessly lost expression when face to face with the Swedish girl who she got so terribly entangled in. Satya then decided that her question to Ashe earlier didn’t need to stand; she already had her answer, and the successive question of who ‘her’ referred to didn’t need further confirmation. She really _did_ care about the maligned mechanic.

“Are… are you crying?”

“No,” Ashe sniffled, standing up and unspooling electrical tape to bind Moira’s limp limbs “I’m just allergic to this fucking bitch’s **_bullshit_**.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's another chapter but that's the epilogue, i miscalculated how much i had left u_u


	10. The Last Exchange

“They got your call, right?”

“Yes,” Satya answered, leaning against the battered car, the engine crackling as it powered down. She looked at her phone and frowned; despite the relative remoteness of this place (by a recycling plant, no less, in Blaine County), the signal was remarkable. They simply hadn’t gotten into contact with her since. Ashe leaned against the opposite side, though for the moment turning and peering into the backseat where the tied-up Moira was beginning to stir.

“Any indication who Angela’s takin’ with her?”

“Hana, for certain,” Satya replied, eyes trailing from the signal indicator to the wallpaper: a picture of the two of them overlooking the iconic Vinewood sign and the city unfolding behind them, taken on Hana’s selfie stick. She smiled seeing how fiercely Hana embraced her with one arm “As soon as she heard my voice on the speaker, she got very excited and worried all at once.”

“Bet it’s nice havin’ someone who cares aboutcha,” Ashe mumbled, sighing despondently. She tilted her head back up from where she was shoegazing when her ear twigged the sound of another car arriving. “Guess that’s them.”

The biker opened the passenger seat, dragging out the bound Moira and with a mighty heave of the lanky, wriggling body, she threw her into an upright seating position on the car trunk. With a sarcasm-laden pat to the scowling ex-Talon’s face, Ashe turned to face the parking car and watched as the target of her tarnished journey stepped out with an older Fareeha than what she recalled, the Korean firebrand she had to subdue the other day, and then, _her_ …

Moira’s eyes lit up seeing Angela, who snarled in response, shuffled behind Fareeha. Ashe barely gave the polite greeting she had intended, when Satya and Hana launched themselves at each other and hugged so tightly she could’ve sworn they were about to meld into one being. The gamer fussed over the bandaged hand, angrily working herself up to fight Ashe when the fighting spirit got sucked out of her by her lover hushing her with the insistence that the biker helped her. Fareeha and Angela overheard the admittedly none-too-quiet exchange, which convinced them not to make hasty judgements, and to let Ashe say her piece. The two couples, who had all been privy to a whole host of Merryweather and Talon aftershock and nonsense over the last year (Fareeha and Hana noting the ironic return to the recycling plant), did not account for the wildcard who joined them. Satya looked and noticed that Ashe only had eyes for Brigitte, and this was the first instant she could say without a doubt that Brigitte reciprocated that needlepoint focus. It was, however, a focus that radiated volcanic anger and hate, rather than the desperate, emotionally-muddled gaze of pained red eyes.

And before Fareeha can reach out and grab Brigitte, she was gone.

With all the molten fury that she could summon, the mechanic barged her way into Ashe, levelling her broad shoulders with the slender woman’s waist. Contact was intense, painful and it winded the elder of the entanglement, brought harshly down onto her back further pushing the air out of her lungs. Brigitte stumbled in the initial tackle at the last stage, and it afforded Ashe the breathing space to scramble back to her feet. Despite the Swede’s bigger bulk and height, she was still rather swift, and was quick to pursue.

“Brigitte, darlin’, c’mon— _please_ hear me out, I’m _done_ \--!” Ashe shouted, weaving and dodging the furious swings of fists she didn’t have a hope in hell of blocking “I ain’t puttin’ up with that Moira fuckhead’s shit no more! I’m **_done_** , she’s all yours!”

Angela watched as Ashe’s pleading bounced completely off the implacable student, though it had certainly appealed to her when Moira, despite being bound and immobile, still possessed the incredible ability to make her skin crawl. It was almost as if it was merely yesterday that Moira was mentally destroying her in some disused Little Seoul business. Hana looked between her host moms and Satya, then at her best friend who channelled her mourning into violence “Hey—Brigs! **_BRIGS!_** Cool your jets, she’s not gonna pull shit anymore!”

Brigitte didn’t listen, nor did she want to. In the absence of any defined technique she swung, she lunged, endlessly pursuing Ashe until evasion tired her out.

“I must say, this is fascinating to see,” Moira chirped, not at all bothered by her current position slung onto the trunk of a car under the unwavering sunlight “I wonder if the little Lindholm girl can take her first life.”

“Shut up,” Angela hissed, not missing a beat. Hana, in full protective mode, stepped out ahead of both eomma #1 and #2 and barked at the tied-up ginger “Yeah, shut the fuck up you praying mantis! You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to you.”

“I’m _terrified_ ,” Moira answered with a roll of her eyes “You don’t exactly strike fear into my heart, mind.”

Before Hana added a set of choice insults to ascribe to the hateful woman astride a vehicular rear, Ashe was thrown down without much fanfare hard on her back between the two, wincing, having landed on her coach gun still attached to her upper thigh. She was given no reprieve, when Brigitte brought the full weight of her body down on top of the older woman, though she did not take immediate action—she too was exhausted from the cat and mouse chase that preluded this particular grapple.

“Well,” Ashe panted, her body relaxing as she acknowledged the Swedish girl besting her “Y’got me. Y’wanna finish me off n’ put things right?”

She received nothing but silence enhancing Brigitte’s iron-wrought glare.

“C’mon. Avenge yer pops already. Get ridda me. Just—just don’t kill Moira please. Punish her sure, but I need her to help Bob--.”

Swiss German muttering was barely audible, but no one paid it much heed, apart from Moira, who assumed it was insisting for the opposite of Ashe’s wish. Brigitte stared into forlorn red eyes, before moving her mighty palms around the biker’s neck. Satya started forward, hoping to prevent her from making an irreconcilable mistake, appealing to the partialness she had to the surgeon “Brigitte, **_don’t--!_** ”

Ashe felt strong hands around her neck, those she knew once upon a time to have gripped her hips with a juxtaposition of firm though tender touch, but now full of justified malice focused on her throat. Lying beneath her, she idly thought of how this was a redo of the encounter in the Vinewood Hills home, but with the thought of that torrid affair in her hotel room, it was banished to the ether when the more vivid memory of Brigitte between her legs bubbled forth. Ashe couldn’t look her stalling attacker in the eye, glancing away and wishing there was some way to have done things differently—spare her of the turmoil the mechanic no doubt had to endure since. She said nothing, nor did she think she really could speak with a grip on her, but the albinistic woman gave Brigitte a look of acceptance, more than willing to face her fate.

But the hands on her neck never squeezed. The airflow to her lungs was never obstructed once.

“If you call that strangling, I’d hate to see what you think a noose is,” Moira quipped darkly, drawing the attention of the would-be avenger.

“Shut the fuck up,” Brigitte snapped, stock still in her position as before, her hands still unable to finalise the chokehold, her eyes locked on Ashe’s. Her treacherous mind overlaid the sight before her with flashes of scenes she cursed as tortuous, images of the biker naked and undulating with the pleasure the student drove into her, a handsome blush underlining red eyes that were captivating and captivated both. The sounds from that fateful night crept back into her mind, the lascivious murmur of her name on ruby lips at a husky pitch that resonated even now within, stirring up unbidden the same lust as if it did not comprehend what Ashe did outside of that bed.

“Brigitte, you need to know--,” Satya piped up, determined to coax sense and logic into the engineering student’s senses “Moira pushed Ashe into that one-night stand, she knew ahead of time what it would do—she _knew_ Ashe killed Torbjörn and did it anyway.”

“Don’t absolve me,” Ashe whispered, closing her eyes “I still had my part t’play in makin’ this girl’s life hell. Just—don’t kill Moira, _please_.”

“You heard her,” the woman in question chuckled “Why can’t y’finish her off?”

By now Ashe could feel quivering in the hands on her neck, shaking that went hand in hand with what she knew as tears gently splashing onto her face. Brigitte was crying, her chest heaving as she still held eye contact with her pinned foe, but the grip in her hands would not tighten any further as before. Her hands fell away, and with a slow droop where her head rested against Ashe’s shoulder, the brunette broke down into hearty sobbing, incomprehensibly mumbling in what the biker could only assume was fractured Swedish. Far from it being her place to do so, the Deadlock MC president went ahead and murmured apologies and what reassurances she could, a bizarre situation that everyone could recognise, but respectfully stayed silent on.

Except for Moira, whose sadistic laughter filled the desert air.

“Aha, of course! Poor petal can’t commit to her first murder because of _feelings_.”

Brigitte’s sobbing tapered off, sitting back enough for Ashe to desperately make eye contact and plead “Don’t—she’s goadin’ ya like she’s been doin’ to everyone nonstop. Don’t kill her, I need her to live!”

Her shoulders shook, with heavy inhaling and exhaling through her nose like an angry bull, hands resting on Ashe’s shoulders that were heartbreakingly gentle when they should have been throttling the last of her life out by now. Brigitte steadily raised her head to stare Moira down with watery, bloodshot eyes that still bore such _malice_ despite her broken demeanour. In spite of every effort the pinned bounty hunter made to intervene on the former medical staff’s behalf, the Irishwoman was insistent on proverbially twisting the rusted, poisoned knife in Brigitte’s gut.

“Y’look at me like I’m not affirming the truth of the matter. You see, I am _above_ such interactions, so I don’t have to worry about getting into such situations. Therefore, I get to enjoy the repercussions suffered by those who trust so naively, as to fall headfirst into such wonderful messes.”

“Moira, fer the love o’God, _shut the everloving fuck up fer yer own wretched sake!_ ”

“You _sick_ **_fuck_** ,” Brigitte snarled, shifting from where she perched, still atop Ashe, still unsure what to even do with the bounty hunter who still begged with words unheard by the Swede. In the moment, the others watching the scene looked at the grimace turning the otherwise cheerful and kind face they knew, but only Hana realised how curiously leonine she looked there and then. Ana’s words reverberated in the gamer’s head, and she knew she’d have something to press the retired mercenary on later.

“Power to make such things happen is rather _intoxicating_ , especially when you drive someone so pure and honourable to sink to the same murderous depths as everyone else.”

“ ** _MOIRA!_** ” Ashe shouted futilely, trying so hard to derail the self-congratulatory yet simultaneously imminently incriminating and self-destructive tangent her employer was going on, realising her mistake far too late in bringing Moira to them. She did not account for this, for the risk that Moira would be to herself, and ultimately, to Bob’s own longevity.

Moira replied, nonchalantly stoking the fires of impulsive action—whether it was out of ignorance or arrogance, no one could tell “Why, when I heard Elizabeth murdered your father in a fit of rage but then happened upon you grieving, as Dr Vaswani pointed out, I had the pleasure of calling her that night.”

“You’re fucking **_inhuman!_** ” the wounded Swede roared, upright with her hands pulled into fists.

“So of course, I’d prod her to engage in congress with you—look at how you’ve fallen apart so delectably--!”

She was permanently interrupted when the coach gun, yanked free from Ashe’s hip despite the shift in position allowing the biker to have fought for it, was pulled on the Irishwoman with an explosive bang. Her body snapped back with a loud clang against the rest of the car trunk, the spatter of gore and brain matter splashing across it and the desert sand, shortly joined by the freshly made, faceless corpse dropping limply to the dirt after it. Silence hung in the air, bar Brigitte’s laboured panting and staring at the results of her handiwork, throwing the gun aside and glancing behind her to see the utterly shocked expressions on Fareeha, Satya and Hana’s faces. Only Angela gave her anything different in her worn eyes, a look that treaded the line between resolution and an empty relief finely.

“That’s it then. He’s… he’s fuckin’ dead. Just like that.”

“What?” Brigitte snapped out of her internal spiral, grappling with the ramifications of taking a life so impetuously as Ashe had taken her father’s, her attention coincidentally drawn by her sudden outburst “Who is?”

Ashe wasn’t paying attention, eyes fixed skyward, glassy and flowing with tears as she began to cave into dejected sorrow “I gave _everythin’_ up just to try keep that psycho alive—just so she could keep Bob goin’.”

“Who’s Bob?” Brigitte asked, desperation in her voice, slowly climbing off Ashe but keeping eye contact even when it wasn’t matched. Though she now was free to move around, the bounty hunter remained stock still, lying on the ground barely feet away from the rapidly cooling body of Moira O’Deorain, the last hope she had in keeping the only one she really cared about alive.

“He’s all I had left.”

The comprehension seeped in slowly at first in the immediate aftermath, but after those words, it curled around her organs, around her bones, and froze them in horror. Brigitte looked towards the only anchors to reality left, away from what she had done, realising far too late when her turbulent fears were confirmed by the trio of grim expressions. From what context clues she flailed at, she had guaranteed in killing Moira the death of someone dear to Ashe, who had no involvement in anything. She had turned into what she hated; a callous killer who cared not for the repercussions in taking a life. Reeling, Brigitte crumpled to the ground, overwhelmed.

In contrast, Ashe stood up, seeming gaunt and older than she was, stumbling towards Satya. Instinctively, Hana got in the way, though her body may have radiated protectiveness, her eyes were full of questions—unsure how to parse the way the bounty hunter carried herself.

“Priya, I think she wants to talk.”

“I’m making this quick,” Ashe stressed, shoulders hunched slightly, feeling the burn of the sun now “I gotta get out and treat my skin, then I gotta—I gotta tell Bob he won’t get treated anymore, cos Moira’s dead.”

“Surely, we can come up with an alternative treatment?” Angela suddenly piped up, lively and ready to challenge Moira’s so-called medical prowess, ready to dismantle that twisted legacy wherever she could “I’m _positive_ there’s something we can do.”

“You don’t bend the ethics like she did. Bob needed stuff that Moira did terrible things to get, to turn into something that could support him. All y’can do is ease his sufferin’; no reversin’ what she’s done nor what his disease did to him already.” Ashe ran a shaking hand through her white hair, tightening her eyes shut to try stem the tears that were rolling freely down her face “I appreciate the offer, but… but yer too late for’m. Just… I’m gonna leave my number, and my address—give that to Brigitte. When she’s ready, I’ll be ready.”

Satya raised her brow. Hana pressed the question that she would have asked anyway “…what do you mean ready?”

“When she’s ready to avenge her pops,” Ashe answered, smiling brokenly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> epilogue next!


	11. The Ballad of San Andreas

_Two weeks later…_

Procopio Boulevard, Paleto Bay; a grand house sat in its freshly restored state by the Hen House, something the Ashe family had long protested the building of but for once their old blood, old money status was ignored for the favour of the aging, leering and lecherous population in the town for a rare change. There was a knock on the door—really, it was a pummelling the poor innocent door had no part in earning. Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe, still in the deepest of doldrums after visiting the deteriorating (but conversely, happier) Robert Cambria Birch, clutched her beer bottle and stumbled towards the door, wondering who the hell it could be.

Two men in grey suits with green pinstripes stared back at her, sharing a glance between each other as if they could scarcely believe this woman was responsible for putting their clan heir presumptive in the hospital. She was a sorry state, and though Hanzo gave the order to corner her, it looked like she’d end up drinking herself to death shortly.

“Are you Ashe?”

“One n’ only,” she answered nonchalantly, chugging from the bottle “Did your boss send you to whack me?”

The biker was met with two stern looks betraying very little. She chuckled darkly “If he did, he _can’t_. Only one person can kill me and last I checked, she was far more willing to do it with her own bare hands than your boss.”

“Are you saying Shimada-san is a coward?!” one growled.

Ashe didn’t even blink, leaning against the doorway “If he ain’t _that_ , he’s definitely too lazy to do his own work. I mean, it’s personal enough to merit him getting his hands dirty, which he won’t.”

“That’s enough,” the other snipped, pulling out his pistol and pointing it towards the unmoved Ashe, who looked at it with the same disdainful sneer that she might look at an overflowing garbage can overturn in front of her. Just then, her phone buzzed. She quirked her brow at the men, the fellow who wielded the gun grumbled and waved at her to answer it “You have that call, but nothing else.”

She looked. The number was new, as was the name she had entered with it, but the baggage it held was profound: Angela Ziegler was calling.

“H…hello?”

“ _Hi, Elizabeth, did those Shimada men turn up outside your house?_ ”

“Yeah they did. How’d you know that?”

“ _I know the brothers on a personal basis—Genji and Hanzo, that is, not those two men. I don’t think they’re related, now that I think of it. Anyway, never mind that. Put me on speakerphone?_ ”

“Your wish is my command,” Ashe mumbled, wide-eyed, obeying the request.

“ _Hello? This is Dr Angela Ziegler; I’m responsible for monitoring Genji Shimada’s condition. I’ve spoken to Hanzo, and the woman that he ordered you to take out is not to be harmed_.”

“How do we know you’re the real Ziegler?” asked one of the men. Just as he said the word real, he heard an angry demand in Japanese that he knew was unmistakeably the elder son of Sojiro Shimada.

“ _She IS the real deal and she IS carrying my message across. I have changed my mind, and you are to return to the city at once. Failure to comply will result in disciplinary action!_ ”

A full minute of astounded silence elapsed.

“ _Ashe, you there? Let’s go back to one on one audio._ ”

The biker clicked the appropriate button, holding it to her ear as she watched the cowed Shimada men retreat hurriedly back to the nearby Zaibatsu vehicle parked on the curb.

“ _Brigitte’s on her way. I… I didn’t try to convince her not to go or anything like that, it is her decision that I don’t want to be involved in—god I hope she didn’t change her mind from what she told me— but, whatever happens, I’ll keep up the care for Robert in Pillbox Hill_.”

“…thanks doc. That’s—that’s real good of you.”

The line went dead, and Ashe shut the door, locking it behind her and sighing wearily as she dragged herself to an armchair in the living room adjacent to the main door. Angling her head back and staring into space, the recollection of her trip to the new private ward where Bob was kept flooded her mind and she sank into it reluctantly.

* * *

Angela had pulled all sorts of strings to get him airlifted into the best possible care available in the bustling city, when she had no reason to do so other than the good of her heart and perhaps a smidgeon of proving herself a better medical expert than the late Moira. Still, regret ruled Ashe’s heart when accompanying her into the Mt Zonah Centre, guilty in her part for trying so hard to drag the good doctor towards O’Deorain’s clutches and justifiably viewed with great suspicion by the handful of Shimada suits who patrolled the streets. Only by Angela’s grace did they stay their hands then.

When she was reunited with Bob again, the large, muscular man that she remembered had wilted dramatically away, gaunt with barely anything meaningful clinging to his now bony body. There were a lot more tubes plugged into him than she remembered, but he smiled even wider than before behind his thick moustache at her “Y’finally turned on her. I’m glad.”

“Bob, yer gonna _die_ because of it,” Ashe mumbled through tears, close by his side “I tried so hard, I just wanted to keep you goin’, I couldn’t—I couldn’t stick it out an’ I made a fuckin’ **_mess_** of everything.”

The rhythmic rise and fall of the artificial, external lung diaphragm preluded the fading man’s answer “I toldja before, durin’ and now after the fact, y’shoulda just popped Moira and left it. My day was always gonna come much sooner than yours. I jus’ wish y’didn’t go to such lengths for her. This wasn’t worth it.”

Ashe had been so fired up and so firm in her belief that she would do anything to extend his lifespan, but now at the end of that journey, where she could no longer deny Death of its longed-for bounty, she was lost and hopeless. All the biker wanted to do was to pay back Bob for his many years of protecting her from the wrath of her family when she stepped out of line, and though her parents had been dead for the better part of a decade, their shadows still cast on her life after them. Such was it that the mere mention of their names would even now elicit a vulnerable flinch, waiting for the hit that thankfully would not come from them.

“What’s done is done. I just… guess I wish y’felt that way sooner,” Bob wheezed, taking her wrist gently. Ashe closed her eyes and whimpered when she felt the infirm squeeze, but knew the older man was using all of the strength he could. When she opened them once more to look at him, in his expression was something of a grim countenance “I wish y’didn’t sign yer own death warrant tryin’ to fight the impossible. Life’s a bitch, there ain’t any such thing as changin’ destiny or happy endings—we just gotta do what we can with what cards we got dealt.”

He sat up, or he tried to until Angela rushed to assist him, looking at his lifelong family friend “I know whatcher gonna say too—I’m worth that n’ all that shit. Nah, I had an expiry date that’s much sooner than yours was, and I’m just… if this girl Brigitte comes after ya n’ puts ya 6 feet under, I gotta say, if I see ya on the other side so soon? I ain’t just gon’ be _disappointed_ , but I’m gon’ be _mighty_ upset that y’just ran to the grave earlier than livin’ for yerself.”

Ashe hung her head, lightly shaking with her quiet weeping. Bob let his stern expression ebb away to a faint smile, extending his arm around her and giving her a comforting half-embrace to the best of his ability “Well, y’knew I wasn’t gonna be able t’protect ya from the rest of the world forever, but I’m glad I was able to keep yer shitheel parents from hurting ya. Old money, old blood n’ that lineage shit don’t mean anyone gets to beat their kids for wantin’ to be themselves.”

“I’m gonna miss you so much, you fuckin’ bastard.”

“Hey, don’t start any final goodbyes with me. We’re goin’ to the same corner o’hell after all. When we gotta go our separate ways for a while, you’ll know.”

* * *

With a start she snapped awake, rapidly blinking her stinging eyes clear from the impromptu alcoholic nap she ended up drifting to. The knock on the door rapped against the heavy wood once more, letting Ashe piece together that this noise was probably the reason she stirred so suddenly. Grunting as she pulled herself to her feet, and one reluctant dragging to the door some seconds later, the albinistic woman unlocked the door and peeled it open, slowing the action down as her widening eyes took in none other than Brigitte Lindholm.

“ _Hej_.”

“Sugar,” Ashe blurted out, the bottle dropping from her hand. It never smashed, thanks to the far quicker reflexes of the sober mechanic who took it and offered it back to her. The biker didn’t even register the gesture, so muddled and mixed up and unable to discern what emotion she should be having in seeing her again “…wh-When didja turn up? I know—I know yer gonna even the score but I just—I thought I’d be able to dress fer the occasion.”

“Can I come in?”

“…what?”

“Your house—can I come in?” Brigitte repeated patiently. It took a second for the older woman to realise what she was requesting, stumbling all over to get out of the way. As soon as the door was closed behind her, the mechanic looked over her shoulder at her “I’m not here to even any score.”

Ashe held herself, unable to meet the look the burlier girl gave her “…why y’here then?”

“I want to just talk, is that okay?”

“What’s there to talk about?” she muttered, scowling at the floor which shifted before her when she felt a careful hand at the small of her back guiding her into the living room and onto the couch “I killed yer dad. I killed that agent, I—did I kill Genji Shimada? …I hurt the smug little fuck, I know that much.”

“He’s still in the hospital,” Brigitte helpfully clarified, patting her shoulder.

“Well, yeah, then I kidnapped Satya Vaswani n’ I brought her into the fuckin viper’s nest. I know you like Satya a lot so… I’ve done a lotta transgressions against ya, n’ I figure that’s another on my list of shit y’need to avenge.”

“I don’t _need_ to avenge anything,” the younger woman answered quickly, sitting beside her. “I… well, I visited Mr Birch in his ward. I asked Angela about it, and she showed me through to him. I talked to him about you, and everything that happened.”

That got her attention. Ashe’s bleary red eyes—redder beyond the unique, melanin-deficient irises with lack of sleep and profuse sobbing over the last few days—looked into Brigitte’s, her jaw set tightly like she wanted to stop herself from suddenly blabbering something about her youth and what Bob meant to her. Chances were, Brigitte already learned it from Bob himself, given he was on his deathbed and had only the time to reflect on the life he lived already.

“I understand why you went through all that to keep him alive, and he apologised to me for what you’ve done. It’s not really his place though, but it’s okay. If anything, I had to apologise to him for taking his care away from him. That said, I’m not here to do this forgive and forget stuff; we’ve all gone through too much to dismiss it like that,” Brigitte stated, folding her arms and sitting back into the seat, her whole demeanour so curiously relaxed when Ashe thought she would be twitchy on the doorstep of taking apart her dad’s murderer. This couldn’t be further from the student’s mind “Even so, while I don’t want to just forget it and act like it didn’t happen, I don’t want it ruling over everything either. What’s done is done, I’m telling you now that I won’t be seeking to return ‘the favour’ or whatever way you put it; your life isn’t mine to take.”

“You’re… you’re _sparing_ me?” Ashe baulked, shoulders dropping.

“Uh, I guess so, yeah!” Brigitte replied, smiling as delicately as she could at her “I don’t think an eye for an eye is how anything can improve.”

“How can y’just…”  Flabbergasted beyond all belief, she wildly gestured around, trying to compute the gesture and reconcile it with her steadily sobering mind “How can y’just let me _live_? Darlin’, sparin’ me is worse than torture cos I gotta live with the shit I did to you! I ruined so much of yer _life_.”

“Yeah, but I still have enough of one to go back to; my friends became another family during all this, and I learned a lot about my own—there was stuff my mother didn’t share with me for a long time that came out after papa’s funeral. You lost a lot more than I did with all this, all just because you wanted to keep someone you love safe.”

There was a question she wanted to ask about why Brigitte corrected herself like that, but Ashe set it aside. It wasn’t her business. She had little reason to make anything _else_ her business to begin with, having gotten so thoroughly, utterly mixed up with everyone else’s.

“I don’t have much of anythin’ left. The one old friend I got won’t talk to me again, leavin’ me with nothin’.” Ashe peered in the now empty bottle, frowning when the hollow sound betrayed no sign of any more alcohol lurking in the depths of glass. She leaned over and sat it on the floor “S’just a matter o’time before someone I’ve inevitably pissed off does decide to come and kill me for whoever it was I hurt in that ol’ backlog I got.”

“They’ll have to go through me.”

The biker’s head whipped around to face her unlikely companion at a speed that could’ve given her whiplash for days “Exfuckinscuse me?”

“I’m not going to kill you, and I’m not going to let _anyone else_ kill you,” Brigitte clarified with a stoic, stern nod “It’d be an easy way out, and I don’t like half-assing anything. Besides, the Shimadas won’t for definite--.”

“Yeah, cos doc Ziegler told the big bro to drop it--.”

“— _because_ I asked Angela to rein them in if she could, given her connections. Satya offered to make an assist on that too; Hanzo definitely wouldn’t listen to me by myself.”

Ashe felt the otherwise dulling effects of the alcohol evaporate in full, her mind painfully sharp and hyper-focused on the words that just spilled out of Brigitte’s mouth, bringing the young woman into an acutely clear lucidity. Puzzle pieces hitherto incomprehensible not only manifested in her mind, but immediately clicked into place.

“…are you making sure all the collateral I fucking caused trying to get that fucking doctor for that psycho ain’t gonna catch up to me? This—this all yer plan then? Y’just makin’ sure I live with it?” She had to laugh; this was a special sort of ruthlessness and a creative kind of cruelty that just might balance out as a suitable punishment for all of the biker’s crimes against the poor girl “Christ, sparing me really is fuckin’ worse than torture. Y’gonna put me in bubble wrap and march out to make me look at all those people whose lives I dramatically worsened?”

“No!” Brigitte snapped; just as quickly as she leaned forward quickly, she paused and steadied her upper body, composing herself as much as she could. She let out a brisk, shallow sigh “For the last time, I’m not trying to put you into a fucking purgatorial ordeal. I’m just… I’m sick of this violence.”

The weary mechanic took a deep breathe, sitting upright and looking over at Ashe, who avoided eye contact as much as possible “I asked Mr Birch—I asked him if there was any way I could make up for what I had done. He asked me to make sure you live your life the way you always should have. So… that’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to protect you and make sure you can live the way he wanted you to. I’m going to be your shield.”

“That fucking asshole. What the fuck’s he playin’ at?” A long second hung in the air as the older woman rubbed her tired eyes and struggled to maintain composure, swallowing back down the tears of anger and the guilt as much as she could “Yer already way, way too mixed up with me, sweetheart, y’don’t deserve this.”

“Well, _no one_ deserves the shit they get from Los Santos, do they?” the brunette answered with a weak shrug “The city does what it can to grind you down and turn you into a cynical husk of yourself. I’m trying… I kinda gave in already when I got so murderous towards you, huh? I’m trying to circle back but—but I _know_ there’s no changing what I’ve been through. What I’m trying to say—I’m reconciling how I was before, what I became, and trying to meet these halfway so that… never mind.”

She hung her head, leaning forward and letting her tied back hair drape by her face. The thick curtain obscured her wistful look. Trying to comprehend the extremely complex situation she was in and the equally labyrinthine way she was mentally and emotionally trying to come out the other side of it a better person was by no means an easy task. And then, Brigitte felt a warm hand on her shoulder. If someone— _anyone--_ had told her the circumstances that she was to fall into, at the very zenith of her righteous fury, she would have laughed a terrible, demented and furious laugh. Now, however, when Brigitte offered the woman who caused the turbulent month of her life a timid smile, there was a distinct sense of rising above the dense, hateful core that had grown inside of her. Now, it absolutely remained, and would naturally take a long time to ever truly dissipate, but this was a crucial first step.

“I hate so much what I’ve done t’ya. I hate it so much,” Ashe murmured, a hitch in her voice that was evident and ever on the precipice of tears “You’re too goddamn good for this world, especially with whatcha just spoke of, and I can’t fuckin’ _stand_ that I hurt you. I just fucking wish this didn’t happen, things were different, just—it’s a lil selfish of me too because I really enjoyed… fuck me this is awkward as all get out.”

“The hotel?” _Wow, got it in one_.

“…yup.”

“Still on your mind?”

 _Guilty as charged,_ Ashe thought remorsefully, feeling nauseating compunction at the back of her throat when cornered on this by Brigitte herself. She shut her eyes tightly and grimaced, retracting her hand from the younger woman’s back “Yyyyyup.”

“Same here.”

And now her eyes flew wide open at her in complete surprise, an anxious compression felt around her lungs and heart, frozen in place “Yuh— _what?_ ”

Brigitte this time offered a similarly caught-red-handed look and a shoulder-heavy shrug “Yeah. I know, messed up right? …I guess for all my preaching, Los Santos still took its toll on me. I talked with Angela and she seems the be the only person remotely happy that I’m not just—y’know—looking to take revenge. The Amaris both are going with what she thinks, Satya and Hana don’t super get it, but they’re backing me. I said that the hatchet’s buried, but I’m not going to forget about the blood on it. Some of the others aren’t as sympathetic; they’re confused that I’m not here to finish the job.”

“I can imagine,” Ashe muttered, remembering one curt message from Jesse telling her that if he sees her again after finding out what she did, she wouldn’t be getting back out alive. The sentiment might be shared with Amélie for all she could assume. She sat back in the couch, glancing out of the window nearby and pondering what they were doing right now “People are pretty understandably pissed off with me.”

“I don’t know if I can rehabilitate your image--.”

“Which y’probably _shouldn’t_ be doin’, sugar, let’s be honest.”

Ashe suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder and firm strength move her to face a determined student “—but I _can_ keep you safe, and that’s what I’m going to do, because I promised a dying man I would. I know I’m not gonna be alone in coming to terms with what happened, I’ve got a lot of family and friends around me. I’m just… I’m just making sure you at least have someone in your corner too.”

“…Is that hotel business kinda influencin’ yer decision a lil?”

“A little,” Brigitte acquiesced, glancing away and feeling shame wriggle up through her gut. However, her hand did not leave Ashe, instead resting on her upper arm. It was almost affectionate, and the whole situation was so patently absurd the biker couldn’t help but feebly laugh—something the mechanic joined in on quietly.

“Christ almighty, what a _fucked- **up**_ pair we make.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things: this epilogue took forever because trying to navigate this to a remotely satisfying ending of some kind was exceedingly difficult given the shit that happened in the fic (ironic lmao i know)  
> secondly, someone please fucking ban me from writing another additional fic in this setting every time blizz adds new idiots to overwatch, i can't keep doing this pls  
> if peeps want to know what happened to our other lovable idiot protagonists as well in the after-fic events pls lmk, if enough ppl do i'll add a 'chapter' just summarising it


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